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ESSAYS: 
SECOND SERIES, 



ESSAYS 



SECOND SERIES. 



R. ¥. EMERSON 



Seconto 3SUf tf on. 



BOSTON: 
PHILLIPS, SAMPSON & CO., 

110 WASHINGTON STREET. 
1852. 



• A 3 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1850, by 

PHILLIPS, SAMPSON & CO., 

in the Clerk's Offico of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts, 

Gift 

W. L. Shoemaker * 
7 S '06 



STEREOTYPED AT THE 
BOSTON STEREOTYPE FOUNDRY. 



CONTENTS. 



FACE. 

ESSAY I. 



The Poet, 



ESSAY II. 
Experience, 49 

ESSAY III. 
Character, 91 

ESSAY IV. 
Manners, 119 

ESSAY V. 
Gifts, 155 

ESSAY VI. 

Nature, , . .165 

1* 



6 CONTENTS. 

ESSAY VII. 
Politics, 193 

essay vni. 

Nominalist and Realist, 217 

NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 
Lecture at Amort Hall, 243 



THE POET. 



A moody child and wildly -wise 

Pursued the game with joyful eyes, 

Which chose, like meteors, their way, 

And rived the dark with private ray : 

They overleapt the horizon's edge, 

Searched with Apollo's privilege ; 

Through man, and woman, and sea, and star, 

Saw the dance of nature forward far ; 

Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times, 

Saw musical order, and pairing rhymes. 



Olympian bards who sung 
Divine ideas below, 

Which always find us young, 
And always keep us so. 



ESSAY I. 
THE POET. 



Those who are esteemed umpires of taste, are 
often persons who have acquired some knowledge 
of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an incli- 
nation for whatever is elegant ; but if you inquire 
whether they are beautiful souls, and whether their 
own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that they 
are selfish and sensual. Their cultivation is local, 
as if you should rub a log of dry wood in one spot 
to produce fire, all the rest remaining cold. Then- 
knowledge of the fine arts is some study of rules 
and particulars, or some limited judgment of color 
or form, which is exercised for amusement or for 
show. It is a proof of the shallowness of the doc- 
trine of beauty, as it lies in the minds of our ama- 
teurs, that men seem to have lost the perception of 
the instant dependence of form upon soul. There 
is no doctrine of forms in our philosophy. We 
were put into our bodies, as fire is put into a pan, 



10 ESSAY I. 

to be carried about; but there is no accurate ad- 
justment between the spirit and the organ, much 
less is the latter the germination of the former. So 
in regard to other forms, the intellectual men do 
not believe in any essential dependence of the ma- 
terial world on thought and volition. Theologians 
think it a pretty air-castle to talk of the spiritual 
meaning of a ship or a cloud, of a city or a con- 
tract, but they prefer to come again to the solid 
ground of historical evidence ; and even the poets 
are contented with a civil and conformed manner 
of living, and to write poems from the fancy, at a 
safe distance from their own experience. But the 
highest minds of the world have never ceased to 
explore the double meaning, or, shall I say, the 
quadruple, or the centuple, or much more manifold 
meaning, of every sensuous fact : Orpheus, Em- 
pedocles, Heraclitus, Plato, Plutarch, Dante, Swe- 
denborg, and the masters of sculpture, picture, and 
poetry. For we are not pans and barrows, nor 
even porters of the fire and torch-bearers, but chil- 
dren of the fire, made of it, and only the same di- 
vinity transmuted, and at two or three removes, 
when we know least about it. And this hidden 
truth, that the fountains when all this river of 
Time, and its creatures, floweth, are intrinsically 
ideal and beautiful, draws Us to the consideration 
of the nature and functions of the Poet, or the 



THE POET. 11 

man of Beauty, to the means and materials he 
uses, and to the general aspect of the art in the 
present time. 

The breadth of the problem is great, for the 
poet is representative. He stands among partial 
men for the complete man, and apprises us not of 
his wealth, but of the commonwealth. The 
young man reveres men of genius, because, to 
speak truly, they are more himself than he is. 
They receive of the soul as he also receives, but 
they more. Nature enhances her beauty, to the 
eye of loving men, from their belief that the poet 
is beholding her shows at the same time. He is 
isolated among his contemporaries, by truth and 
by his art, but with this consolation in his pur- 
suits, that they will draw all men sooner or later. 
For all men live by truth, and stand in need of 
expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, 
in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful 
secret. The man is only half himself, the other 
half is his expression. 

Notwithstanding this necessity to be published, 
adequate expression is rare. I know not how it 
is that we need an interpreter ; but the great 
majority of men seem to be minors, who have 
not yet come into possession of their own, or 
mutes, who cannot report the conversation they 
have had with nature. There is no man who 



12 ESSAY I. 

does not anticipate a supersensual utility in the 
sun, and stars, earth, and water. These stand and 
wait to render him a peculiar service. But there 
is some obstruction, or some excess of phlegm in 
our constitution, which does not suffer them to 
yield the due effect. Too feeble fall the impres- 
sions of nature on us to make us artists. Every 
touch should thrill. Every man should be so 
much an artist, that he could report in conversa- 
tion what had befallen him. Yet, in our experi- 
ence, the rays or appulses have sufficient force to 
arrive at the senses, but not enough to reach the 
quick, and compel the reproduction of themselves 
in speech. The poet is the person in whom these 
powers are in balance, the man without impedi- 
ment, who sees and handles that which others 
dream of, traverses the whole scale of experience, 
and is representative of man, in virtue of being 
the largest power to receive and to impart. 

For the Universe has three children, born at one 
time, which reappear, under different names, in 
every system of thought, whether they be called 
cause, operation, and effect ; or, more poetically, 
Jove, Pluto, Neptune ; or, theologically, the Father, 
the Spirit, and the Son ; but which we will call 
here, the Knower, the Doer, and the Sayer. These 
stand respectively for the love of truth, for the love 
of good, and for the love of beauty. These three 



THE POET. 13 

arc equal. Each is that which he is essentially, so 
that he cannot be surmounted or analyzed, and 
each of these three has the power of the others 
latent in him, and his own patent. 

The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents 
beauty. He is a sovereign, and stands on the cen- * 
tre. For the world is not painted, or adorned, but 
is from the beginning beautiful ; and God has not 
made some beautiful things, but Beauty is the cre- 
ator of the universe. Therefore the poet is not 
any permissive potentate, but is emperor in his 
own right. Criticism is infested with a cant of 
materialism, which assumes that manual skill and 
activity is the first merit of all men, and dispar- 
ages such as say and do not, overlooking the fact, 
that some men, namely, poets, are natural sayers, 
sent into the world to the end of expression, and 
confounds them with those whose province is ac- 
tion, but who quit it to imitate the sayers. But 
Homer's words are as costly and admirable to 
Homer, as Agamemnon's victories are to Agamem- 
non. The poet does not wait for the hero or the 
sage, but, as they act and think primarily, so he 
writes primarily Avhat will and must be spoken, 
reckoning the others, though primaries also, yet, 
in respect to him, secondaries and servants ; as sit- 
ters or models in the studio of a painter, or as assist- 
ants who bring building materials to an architect. 



14 



ESSAY I. 



For poetry was all written before time was, and 
whenever we are so finely organized that we can 
penetrate into that region where the air is music, 
we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to 
write them down, but we lose ever and anon a 
word, or a verse, and substitute something of our 
own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men of 
more delicate ear write down these cadences more 
faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, 
become the songs of the nations. For nature is 
as truly beautiful as it is good, or as it is reason- 
able, and must as much appear, as it must be done, 
or be known. Words and deeds are quite indif- 
ferent modes of the divine energy. Words are also 
actions, and actions are a kind of words. 

The sign and credentials of the poet are, that he 
announces that which no man foretold. He is the 
true and only doctor ; he knows and tells ; he 
is the only teller of news, for he was present and 
privy to the appearance which he describes. He 
is a beholder of ideas, and an utterer of the neces- 
sary and causal. For we do not speak now of 
men of poetical talents, or of industry and skill in 
metre, but of the true poet. I took part in a conver- 
sation, the other day, concerning a recent writer 
of lyrics, a man of subtle mind, whose head appeared 
to be a music-box of delicate tunes and rhythms, 
and whose skill, and command of language, we 



THE POET. 15 

could not sufficiently praise. But when the ques- 
tion arose, whether he was not only a lyrist, but a 
poet, we were obliged to confess that he is plainly 
a contemporary, not an eternal man. He does not 
stand out of our low limitations, like a Chimborazo 
under the line, running up from a torrid base 
through all the climates of the globe, with belts of 
the herbage of every latitude on its high and mot- 
tled sides ; but this genius is the landscape-garden 
of a modern house, adorned with fountains and 
statues, with well-bred men and women standing 
and sitting in the walks and terraces. We hear, 
through all the varied music, the ground-tone of 
conventional life. Our poets are men of talents who 
sing, and not the children of music. The argument 
is secondary, the finish of the verses is primary. 
For it is not metres, but a metre-making ar- 
gument, that makes a poem, — a thought so pas- 
sionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant 
or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and 
adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and 
the form are equal in the order of time, but in the 
order of genesis the thought is prior to the form. 
The poet has a new thought : he has a whole new 
experience to unfold ; he will tell us how it was 
with him, and all men will be the richer in his for- 
tune. For the experience of each new age requires 
a new confession, and the world seems always 



16 ESSAY I. 

waiting for its poet. I remember, when I was 
young, how much I was moved one morning by 
tidings that genius had appeared in a youth who 
sat near me at table. He had left his work, and 
gone rambling none knew whither, and had writ- 
ten hundreds of lines, but could not tell whether 
that which was in him was therein told : he could 
tell nothing but that all was changed, — man, beast, 
heaven, earth, and sea. How gladly we listened ! 
how credulous ! Society seemed to be compro- 
mised. We sat in the aurora of a sunrise which 
was to put out all the stars. Boston seemed to be 
at twice the distance it had the night before, or 
was much farther than that. Rome, — what was 
Rome ? Plutarch and Shakspeare were in the yel- 
low leaf, and Homer no more should be heard of. 
It is much to know that poetry has been written 
this very day, under this very roof, by your side. 
What ! that wonderful spirit has not expired ! 
These stony moments are still sparkling and ani- 
mated ! I had fancied that the oracles were all 
silent, and nature had spent her fires, and behold ! 
all night, from every pore, these fine auroras have 
been streaming. Every one has some interest in 
the advent of the poet, and no one knows how 
much it may concern him. We know that the 
secret of the world is profound, but who or what 
shall be our interpreter, we know not. A moun- 



THE POET. 17 

tain ramble, a new style of face, a new person, may- 
put the key into our hands. Of course, the value of 
genius to us is in the veracity of its report. Talent 
may frolic and juggle ; genius realizes and adds. 
Mankind, in good earnest, have availed so far in 
understanding themselves and their work, that the 
foremost watchman on the peak announces his 
news. It is the truest word ever spoken, and the 
phrase will be the fittest, most musical, and the 
unerring voice of the world for that time. 

All that we call sacred history attests that the 
birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology. 
Man, never so often deceived, still watches for the 
arrival of a brother who can hold him steady to a 
truth, until he has made it his own. With what 
joy I begin to read a poem, which I confide in as an 
inspiration ! And now my chains are to be broken j 
I shall mount above these clouds*and opaque airs in 
which I live, — opaque, though they seem trans- 
parent, — and from the heaven of truth I shall see 
and comprehend my relations. That will reconcile 
me to life, and renovate nature, to see trifles ani- 
mated by a tendency, and to know what I am 
doing. Life will no more be a noise ; now I shall 
see men and women, and know the signs by which 
they may be discerned from fools and satans. This 
day shall be better than my birthday : then I be- 
came an animal : now I am invited into the science 
2* 



IS ESSAY I. 

of the real. Such is the hope, but the fruition is 
postponed. Oftener it falls, that this winged man, 
who will carry me into the heaven, whirls me into 
mists, then leaps and frisks about with me as it were 
from cloud to cloud, still affirming that he is bound 
heavenward ; and I, being myself a novice, am slow 
in perceiving that he does not know the way into 
the heavens, and is merely bent that I should admire 
his skill to rise, like a fowl or a flying fish, a little 
way from the ground or the water ; but the all-pierc- 
ing, all-feeding, and ocular air of heaven, that man 
shall never inhabit. I tumble down again soon into 
my old nooks, and lead the life of exaggerations as 
before, and have lost my faith in the possibility of 
any guide who can lead me thither where I would be. 
But, leaving these victims of vanity, let us, with 
new hope, observe how nature, by worthier im- 
pulses, has insured the poet's fidelity to his office 
of announcement and affirming, namely, by the 
beauty of things, which becomes a new and higher 
beauty, when expressed. Nature offers all her crea- 
tures to him as a picture-language. Being used as 
a type, a second wonderful value appears in the 
object, far better than its old value, as the carpen- 
ter's stretched cord, if you hold your ear close 
enough, is musical in the breeze. " Things more 
excellent than every image," says Jamblichus, 
"are expressed through images." Things admit 



THE POET. 19 

of being used as symbols, because nature is a sym- 
bol, in tbe whole, and in every part. Every line 
we can draw in the sand, has expression ; and 
there is no body without its spirit or genius. All 
form is an effect of character ; all condition, of the 
quality of the life ; all harmony, of health ; (and, for 
this reason, a perception of beauty should be sym- 
pathetic, or proper only to the good.) The beauti- 
ful rests on the foundations of the necessary. The 
soul makes the body, as the wise Spenser teaches : 

" So every spirit, as it is more pure, 
And hath in it the more of heavenly light, 
So it the fairer body doth procure 
To habit in, and it more fairly dight, 
"With cheerful grace and amiable sight. 
For, of the soul, the body form doth take, 
For soul is form, and doth the body make." 

Here we find ourselves, suddenly, not in a critical 
speculation, but in a holy place, and should go 
very warily and reverently. We stand before the 
secret of the world, there where Being passes into 
Appearance, and Unity into Variety. 

The Universe is the externization of the soul. 
Wherever the life is, that bursts into appearance 
around it. Our science is sensual, and therefore 
superficial. The earth and the heavenly bodies, 
physics, and chemistry, we sensually treat, as if 
they were self-existent ; but these are the retinue of 



20 ESSAY I. 

that Being we have. " The mighty heaven," said 
Proclus, " exhibits, in its transfigurations, clear 
images of the splendor of intellectual perceptions ; 
being moved in conjunction with the unapparent 
periods of intellectual natures." Therefore, science 
always goes abreast with the just elevation of the 
man, keeping step with religion and metaphysics ; 
or, the state of science is an index of our self- 
knowledge. Since every thing in nature answers 
to a moral power, if any phenomenon remains brute 
and dark, it is because the corresponding faculty in 
the observer is not yet active. 

No wonder, then, if these waters be so deep, 
that we hover over them with a religious regard. 
The beauty of the fable proves the importance of 
the sense ; to the poet, and to all others ; or, if you 
please, every man is so far a poet as to be suscep- 
tible of these enchantments of nature ; for all men 
have the thoughts whereof the universe is the cele- 
bration. I find that the fascination resides in the 
symbol. Who loves nature ? Who does not ? Is 
it only poets, and men of leisure and cultivation, 
who live with her? No ; but also hunters, farmers, 
grooms, and butchers, though they express their af- 
fection in their choice of life, and not in their 
choice of words. The writer wonders what the 
coachman or the hunter values in riding, in horses, 
and dogs. It is not superficial qualities. When 



THE POET. 21 

you talk with him, he holds these at as slight a rate 
as you. His worship is sympathetic ; he has no 
definitions, but he is commanded in nature, by the 
living power which he feels to be there present. 
No imitation, or playing of these things, would 
content him ; he loves the earnest of the north 
wind, of rain, of stone, and wood, and iron. A 
beauty not explicable is dearer than a beauty 
which we can see to the end of. It is nature the 
symbol, nature certifying the supernatural, body 
overflowed by life, which he worships, with coarse 
but sincere rites. 

The inwardness and mystery of this attachment 
drive men of every class to the use of emblems. 
The schools of poets, and philosophers, are not 
more intoxicated with their symbols, than the 
populace with theirs. In our political parties, com- 
pute the power of badges and emblems. See the 
great ball which they roll from Baltimore to Bunker 
Hill ! In the political processions, Lowell goes in 
a loom, and Lynn in a shoe, and Salem in a ship. 
Witness the cider-barrel, the log-cabin, the hickory- 
stick, the palmetto, and all the cognizances of party. 
See the power of national emblems. Some stars, 
lilies, leopards, a crescent, a lion, an eagle, or other 
figure, which came into credit God knows how, on 
an old rag of bunting, blowing in the wind, on a 
fort, at the ends of the earth, shall make the blood 



22 ESSAY I. 

tingle under the rudest, or the most conventional 
exterior. The people fancy they hate poetry, and 
they are all poets and mystics ! 

Beyond this universality of the symbolic lan- 
guage, we are apprised of the divineness of this 
superior use of things, whereby the world is a tem- 
ple, whose walls are covered with emblemsj pictures, 
and commandments of the Deity, in this, that there 
is no fact in nature which does not carry the whole 
sense of nature ; and the distinctions which we make 
in events, and in affairs, of low and high, "honest 
and base, disappear when nature is used as a symbol. 
Thought makes every thing fit for use. The 
vocabulary of an omniscient man would embrace 
words and images excluded from polite conversa- 
tion. What would be base, or even obscene, to 
the obscene, becomes illustrious, spoken in a new 
connection of thought. The piety of the Hebrew 
prophets purges their grossness. The circumcision 
is an example of the power of poetry to raise the 
low and offensive. Small and mean things serve 
as well as great symbols. The meaner the type by 
which a law is expressed, the more pungent it is, 
and the more lasting in the memories of men : just 
as we choose the smallest box, or case, in which 
any needful utensil can be carried. Bare lists of 
words are found suggestive, to an imaginative and 
excited mind ; as it is related of Lord Chatham, that 



THE POET. 23 

he was accustomed to read in Bailey's Dictionary, 
when he was preparing to speak in Parliament. 
The poorest experience is rich enough for all the 
purposes of expressing thought. Why covet a 
knowledge of new facts? Day and night, house 
and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us as 
well as would all trades and all spectacles. We 
are far from having exhausted the significance of the 
few symbols we use. We can come to use them 
yet with a terrible simplicity. It does not need 
that a poem should be long. Every word was once 
a poem. : Every new relation is a new word. Also, 
we use defects and deformities to a sacred purpose, 
so expressing our sense that the evils of the world 
are such only to the evil eye. In the old mythol- 
ogy, mythologists observe, defects are ascribed to 
divine natures, as lameness to Vulcan, blindness to 
Cupid, and the like, to signify exuberances. 

For, as it is dislocation and detachment from the 
life of God, that makes things ugly, the poet, who 
re-attaches things to nature and the Whole, — re- 
attaching eveu artificial things, and violations of 
nature, to nature, by a deeper insight, — disposes 
very easily of the most disagreeable facts. Readers 
of poetry see the factory-village and the railway, 
and fancy that the poetry of the landscape is broken 
up by these ; for these works of art are not yet con- 
secrated in their reading ; but the poet sees them 



24 ESSAY I. 

fall within the great Order not less than the bee- 
hive, or the spider's geometrical web.' Nature 
adopts them very fast into her vital circles, and the 
gliding train of cars she loves like her own. Be- 
sides, in a centred mind, it signifies nothing how 
many mechanical inventions you exhibit. Though 
you add millions, and never so surprising, the fact 
of mechanics has not gained a grain's weight. 
The spiritual fact remains unalterable, by many or 
by few particulars ; as no mountain is of any appre- 
ciable height to break the curve of the sphere. A 
shrewd country-boy goes to the city for the first 
time, and the complacent citizen is not satisfied 
with his little wonder. It is not that he does not 
see all the fine houses, and know that he never saw 
such before, but he disposes of them as easily as 
the poet finds place for the railway. The chief 
value of the new fact, is to enhance the great and 
constant fact of Life, which can dwarf any and 
every circumstance, and to which the belt of wam- 
pum, and the commerce of America, are alike. 

The world being thus put under the mind for verb 
and noun, the poet is he who can articulate it. 
For, though life is great, and fascinates, and absorbs, 
— and though all men are intelligent of the sym- 
bols through which it is named, — yet they cannot 
originally use them. We are symbols, and in- 
habit symbols ; workmen, work, and tools, words 



THE POET. 25 

and things, birth and death, all are emblems ; but 
we sympathize with the symbols, and, being in- 
fatuated with the economical uses of things, we do 
not know that they are thoughts. The poet, by 
an ulterior intellectual perception, gives them a 
power which makes their old use forgotten, and 
puts eyes, and a tongue, into every dumb and inani- 
mate object. He perceives the independence of the 
thought on the symbol, the stability of the thought, 
the accidency and fugacity of the symbol. As the 
eyes of Lyncasus were said to see through the 
earth, so the poet turns the world to glass, and 
shows us all things in their right series and proces- 
sion. For, through that better perception, he stands 
one step nearer to things, and sees the flowing or 
metamorphosis ; perceives that thought is multi- 
form ; that within the form of every creature is a 
force impelling it to ascend into a higher form ; 
and, following with his eyes the life, uses the forms 
which express that life, and so his speech flows with 
the flowing of nature. All the facts of the animal 
economy, sex, nutriment, gestation, birth, growth, 
are symbols of the passage of the world into the 
soul of man, to suffer there a change, and reappear 
a new and higher fact. He uses forms according 
to the life, and not according to the form. This 
is true science. The poet alone knows astronomy, 
chemistry, vegetation, and animation, for he does 
3 



26 ESSAY I. 

not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs. 
He knows why the plain or meadow of space was 
strown with these flowers we call suns, and moons, 
and stars ; why the great deep is adorned with ani- 
mals, with men, and gods ; for, in every word he 
speaks he rides on them as the horses of thought. 
By virtue of this science the poet is the Namer, 
or Language-maker, naming things sometimes af- 
ter their appearance, sometimes after their essence, 
and giving to every one its own name and not an- 
other's, thereby rejoicing the intellect, which de- 
lights in detachment or boundary. The poets made 
all the words, and therefore language is the ar- 
chives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of 
tomb of the muses. For, though the origin of 
most of our words is forgotten, each word was at 
first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, be- 
cause for the moment it symbolized the world to 
the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymolo- 
gist finds the deadest word to have been once a 
brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As 
the limestone of the continent consists of infinite 
masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is 
made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their 
secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of 
their poetic origin. But the poet names the thing 
because he sees it, or comes one step nearer to it 
than any other. This expression, or naming, is not 



THE POET. 27 

art, but a second nature, grown out of the first, as 
a leaf out of a tree. What we call nature, is a cer- 
tain self-regulated motion, or change ; and nature 
does all things by her own hands, and does not 
leave another to baptize her, but baptizes herself; 
and this through the metamorphosis again. I re- 
member that a certain poet described it to me thus : 

Genius is the activity which repairs the decays 
of things, whether wholly or partly of a material 
and finite kind. Nature, through all her kingdoms, 
insures herself. Nobody cares for planting the 
poor fungus : so she shakes down .from the gills of 
one agaric countless spores, any one of which, be- 
ing preserved, transmits new billions of spores to- 
morrow or next day. The new agaric of this 
hour has a chance which the old one had not. 
This atom of seed is thrown into a new place, not 
subject to the accidents which destroyed its parent 
two rods off. She makes a man ; and having 
brought him to ripe age, she will no longer run the 
risk of losing this wonder at a blow, but she de- 
taches from him a new self, that the kind may be 
safe from accidents to which the individual is ex- 
posed. So when the soul of the poet has come to 
ripeness of thought, she detaches and sends away 
from it its poems or songs, — a fearless, sleepless, 
deathless progeny, which is not exposed to the 



28 ESSAY I. 

accidents of the weary kingdom of time : a fearless, 
vivacious offspring, clad with wings (such was the 
virtue of the soul out of which they came), which 
carry them fast and far, and infix them irrecovera- 
bly into the hearts of men. These wings are the 
beauty of the poet's soul. The songs, thus flying 
immortal from their mortal parent, are pursued by 
clamorous flights of censures, which swarm in far 
greater numbers, and threaten to devour them ; but 
these last are not winged. At the end of a very 
short leap they fall plump down, and rot, having 
received from the souls out of which they came no 
beautiful wings. ■ But the melodies of the poet as- 
cend, and leap, and pierce into the deeps of infinite 
time. 

So far the bard taught me, using his freer speech. 
But nature has a higher end, in the production of 
new individuals, than security, namely, ascension, 
or, the passage of the soul into higher forms. I knew, 
in my younger days, the sculptor who made the 
statue of the youth which stands in the public gar- 
den. He was, as I remember, unable to tell direct- 
ly, what made him happy, or unhappy, but by 
wonderful indirections he could tell. He rose one 
day, according to his habit, before the dawn, and 
saw the morning break, grand as the eternity out of 
which it came, and, for many days after, he strove 



THE POET. 29 

to express this tranquillity, and, lo ! his chisel had 
fashioned out of marble the form of a beautiful 
youth, Phosphorus, whose aspect is such, that, it is 
said, all persons who look on it become silent. 
The poet also resigns himself to his mood, and that 
thought which agitated him is expressed, but alter 
idem, in a manner totally new. The expression is 
organic, or, the new type which things themselves 
take when liberated. As, in the sun, objects paint 
their images on the retina of the eye, so they, shar- 
ing the aspiration of the whole universe, tend to 
paint a far more delicate copy of their essence in 
his mind. Like the metamorphosis of things into 
higher organic forms, is their change into melodies. 
Over everything stands its daemon, or soul, and, as 
the form of the thing is reflected by the eye, so 
the soul of the thing is reflected by a melody. The 
sea, the mountain-ridge, Niagara, and every flower- 
bed, pre-exist, or super-exist, in pre-cantations, 
which sail like odors in the air, and when any 
man goes by with an ear sufficiently fine, he over- 
hears them, and endeavors to write down the notes, 
without diluting or depraving them. And herein 
is the legitimation of criticism, in the mind's faith, 
that the poems are a corrupt version of some text in 
nature, with which they ought to be made to tally. 
A rhyme in one of our sonnets should not be less 
.pleasing than the iterated nodes of a seashell, or 
3* 



30 ESSAY I. 

the resembling difference of a group of flowers. 
The pairing of the birds is an idyl, not tedious as 
our idyls are ; a tempest is a rough ode, without 
falsehood or rant : a summer, with its harvest 
sown, reaped, and stored, is an epic song, subordi- 
nating how many admirably executed parts. Why 
should not the symmetry and truth that modulate 
these, glide into our spirits, and we participate the 
invention of nature ? 

This insight, which expresses itself by what is 
called Imagination, is a very high sort of seeing, 
which does not come by study, but by the intel- 
lect being where and what it sees, by sharing the 
path or circuit of things through forms, and so mak- 
ing them translucid to others. The path of things 
is silent. Will they suffer a speaker to go with 
them ? A spy they will not suffer ; a lover, a poet, 
is the transcendency of their own nature, — him 
they will suffer. The condition of true naming, 
on the poet's part, is his resigning himself to the 
divine aura which breathes through forms, and ac- 
companying that. 

It is a secret which every intellectual man quick- 
ly learns, that, beyond the energy of his possessed 
and conscious intellect, he is capable of a new en- 
ergy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by aban- 
donment to the nature of things ; that, beside his 
privacy of power as an individual man, there is a 



THE POET. 31 

great public power, on which he can draw, by un- 
locking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering 
the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him : 
then he is caught up into the life of the Universe, 
his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his 
words are universally intelligible as the plants and 
animals. The poet knows that he speaks adequate- 
ly, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or, 
" with the flower of the mind ;" not with the intel- 
lect, used as an organ, but with the intellect released 
from all service, and suffered to take its direction 
from its celestial life ; or, as the ancients were wont 
to express themselves, not with intellect alone, but 
with the intellect inebriated by nectar. As the trav- 
eller who has lost his way, throws his reins on his 
horse's neck, and trusts to the instinct of the ani- 
mal to find his road, so must we do with the divine 
animal who carries us through this world. For if 
in any manner we can stimulate this instinct, new 
passages are opened for us into nature, the mind 
flows into and through things hardest and highest, 
and the metamorphosis is possible. 

This is the reason why bards love wine, mead, 
narcotics, coffee, tea, opium, the fumes of sandal- 
wood and tobacco, or whatever other procurers of 
animal exhilaration. All men avail themselves of 
such means as they can, to add this extraordinary 
power to their normal powers ; and to this end they 



32 ESSAY I. 

prize conversation, music, pictures, sculpture, dan- 
cing, theatres, travelling, war, mobs, fires, gaming, 
politics, or love, or science, or animal intoxication, 
which are several coarser or finer quasi-mechanical 
substitutes for the true nectar, which is the ravish- 
ment of the intellect by coming nearer to the fact. 
These are auxiliaries to the centrifugal tendency of 
a man, to his passage out into free space, and they 
help him to escape the custody of that body in 
which he is pent up, and of that jail-yard of indi- 
dividual relations in which he is enclosed. Hence 
a great number of such as were professionally ex- 
pressors of Beauty, as painters, poets, musicians, 
and actors, have been more than others wont to lead 
a life of pleasure and indulgence ; all but the few 
who received the true nectar ; and, as it was a spu- 
rious mode of attaining freedom, as it was an eman- 
cipation not into the heavens, but into the freedom 
of baser places, they were punished for that advan- 
tage they won, by a dissipation and deterioration. 
But never can any advantage be taken of nature by 
a trick. The spirit of the world, the great calm 
presence of the Creator, comes not forth to the sor- 
ceries of opium or of wine. The sublime vision 
comes to the pure and simple soul in a clean and 
chaste body. That is not an inspiration which we 
owe to narcotics, but some counterfeit excitement 
and fury. Milton says, that the lyric poet may 



THE POET. 33 

drink wine and live generously, but the epic poet, 
he who shall sing of the gods, and their descent 
unto men, must drink water out of a wooden bowl. 
For poetry is not ' Devil's wine,' but God's wine. 
It is with this as it is with toys. We fill the hands 
and nurseries of our children with all manner of 
dolls, drums, and horses, withdrawing their eyes 
from the plain face and sufficing objects of nature, 
the sun, and moon, the animals, the water, and 
stones, which should be their toys. So the poet's 
habit of living should be set on a key so low, that 
the common influences should delight him. His 
cheerfulness should be the gift of the sunlight ; the 
air should suffice for his inspiration, and he should 
be tipsy with water. That spirit which suffices 
quiet hearts, which seems to come forth to such 
from every dry knoll of sere grass, from every pine- 
stump, and half-imbedded stone, on which the dull 
March sun shines, comes forth to the poor and hun- 
gry, and such as are of simple taste. If thou fill 
thy brain with Boston and New York, with fashion 
and covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy jaded 
senses with wine and French coffee, thou shalt find 
no radiance of wisdom in the lonely waste of the 
pinewoods. 

If the imagination intoxicates the poet, it is not 
inactive in other men. The metamorphosis excites 
in the beholder an emotion of joy. The use of 
.symbols has a certain power of emancipation and 



34 ESSAY I. 

exhilaration for all men. We seem to be touched 
by a wand, which makes us dance and run about 
happily, like children. We are like persons who 
come out of a cave or cellar into the open air. 
This is the effect on us of tropes, fables, oracles, 
and all poetic forms. Poets are thus liberating 
gods. Men have really got a new sense, and found 
within their world, another world, or nest of 
worlds ; for, the metamorphosis once seen, we di- 
vine that it does not stop. I will not now consider 
how much this makes the charm of algebra and the 
mathematics, which also have their tropes, but it is 
felt in every definition ; as, when Aristotle defines 
space to be an immovable vessel, in which things 
are contained ; — or, when Plato defines a line to 
be a flowing point ; or, figure to be a bound of 
solid ; and many the like. What a joyful sense of 
freedom we have, when Vitruvius announces the 
old opinion of artists, that no architect can build 
any house well, who does not know something of 
anatomy. When Socrates, in Charmides, tells us 
that the soul is cured of its maladies by certain in- 
cantations, and that these incantations are beautiful 
reasons, from which temperance is generated in 
souls ; when Plato calls the world an animal ; and 
TimEeus affirms that the plants also are animals ; or 
affirms a man to be a heavenly tree, growing with 
his root, which is his head, upward ; and, as George 
Chapman, following him, writes, — 



THE POET. 35 

" So in our tree of man, whose nervie root 
Springs in his top ; " 

when Orpheus speaks of hoariness as " that white 
flower which marks extreme old age ; " when Pro- 
clus calls the universe the statue of the intellect j, 
when Chaucer, in his praise of ' Gentilesse,' com- 
pares good blood in mean condition to fire, which, 
though carried to the darkest house betwixt this 
and the mount of Caucasus, will yet hold its natu- 
ral office, and burn as bright as if twenty thousand 
men did it behold ; when John saw, in the Apoca- 
lypse, the ruin of the world through evil, and the 
stars fall from heaven, as the figtree casteth her 
untimely fruit ; when JEsop reports the whole 
catalogue of common daily relations through the 
masquerade of birds and beasts ; — we take the 
cheerful hint of the immortality of our essence, 
and its versatile habit and escapes, as when the 
gypsies say of themselves, "it is in vain to hang 
them, they cannot die." 

The poets are thus liberating gods. The an- 
cient British bards had for the title of the'ir order, 
" Those who are free throughout the world." They 
are free, and they make free. An imaginative book 
renders us much more service at first, by stimulat- 
ing us through its tropes, than afterward, when we 
arrive at the precise sense of the author. I think 
nothing is of any value in books, excepting the tran- 



36 ESSAY I. 

scendental and extraordinary. If a man is inflamed 
and carried away by his thought, to that degree 
that he forgets the authors and the public, and heeds 
only this one dream, which holds him like an in- 
sanity, let me read his paper, and you may have all 
the arguments and histories and criticism. All the 
value which attaches to Pythagoras, Paracelsus, 
Cornelius Agrippa, Cardan, Kepler, Swedenborg, 
Schelling, Oken, or any other who introduces ques- 
tionable facts into his cosmogony, as angels, devils, 
magic, astrology, palmistry, mesmerism, and so on, 
is the certificate we have of departure from routine, 
and that here is a new witness. That also is the 
best success in conversation, the magic of liberty, 
which puts the world, like a ball, in our hands. 
How cheap even the liberty then seems ; how mean 
to study, when an emotion communicates to the 
intellect the power to sap and upheave nature : how 
great the perspective ! nations, times, systems, enter 
and disappear, like threads in tapestry of large figure 
and many colors ; dream delivers us to dream, and, 
while the drunkenness lasts, we will sell our bed, 
our philosophy, our religion, in our opulence. 

There is good reason why we should prize this 
liberation. The fate of the poor shepherd, who, 
blinded and lost in the snow-storm, perishes in a 
drift within a few feet of his cottage door, is an 
emblem of the state of man. On the brink of the 



THE POET. 37 

waters of life and truth, we are miserably dying. 
The inaccessibleness of every thought but that we 
are in, is wonderful. What if you come near to it, 
— you are as remote, when you are nearest, as 
when you are farthest. Every thought is also a 
prison ; every heaven is also a prison. Therefore 
we love the poet, the inventor, who in any form, 
whether in an ode, or in an action, or in looks and 
behavior, has yielded us a new thought. He un- 
locks our chains, and admits us to a new scene. 

This emancipation is dear to all men, and the 
power to impart it, as it must come from greater 
depth and scope of thought, is a measure of intellect. 
Therefore all books of the imagination endure, all 
which ascend to that truth, that the writer sees 
nature beneath him, and uses it as his exponent. 
Every verse or sentence, possessing this virtue, will 
take care of its own immortality. The religions 
of the world are the ejaculations of a few imagina- 
tive men. 

But the quality of the imagination is to flow, and 
not to freeze. The poet did not stop at the color, 
or the form, but read their meaning ; neither may 
he rest in this meaning, but he makes the same ob- 
jects exponents of his new thought. Here is the 
difference betwixt the poet and the mystic, that 
the last nails a symbol to one sense, which was a 
true sense for a moment, but soon becomes old and 
4 



38 ESSAY I. 

false. For all symbols are fluxional ; all language 
is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries 
and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and 
houses are, for homestead. Mysticism consists in 
the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol 
for an universal one. The morning-redness hap- 
pens to be the favorite meteor to the eyes of Jacob 
Behmen, and comes to stand to him for truth and 
faith ; and he believes should stand for the same 
realities to every reader. But the first reader pre- 
fers as naturally the symbol of a mother and child, 
or a gardener and his bulb, or a jeweller polishing 
a gem. Either of these, or of a myriad more, are 
equally good to the person to whom they are sig- 
nificant. Only they must be held lightly, and be 
very willingly translated into the equivalent terms 
which others use. And the mystic must be steadily 
told, — All that you say is just as true without the 
tedious use of that symbol as with it. Let us have 
a little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric, — 
universal signs, instead of these village symbols, — 
and we shall both be gainers. The history of 
hierarchies seems to show, that all religious error 
consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, 
and, at last, nothing but an excess of the organ of 
language. 

Swedenborg, of all men in the recent ages, stands 
eminently for the translator of nature into thought. 



THE POET. 39 

I do not know the man in history to whom things 
1 stood so uniformly for words. Before him the 
metamorphosis continually plays. Everything on 
which his eye rests, obeys the impulses of moral 
nature. The figs become grapes whilst he eats 
them. When some of his angels affirmed a truth, 
the laurel twig which they held blossomed in their 
hands. The noise which, at a distance, appeared 
like gnashing and thumping, on coming nearer was 
found to be the voice of disputants. The men, in 
one of his visions, seen in heavenly light, appeared 
like dragons, and seemed in darkness : but, to each 
other, they appeared as men, and, when the light 
from heaven shone into their cabin, they com- 
plained of the darkness, and were compelled to shut 
the window that they might see. 

There was this perception in him, which makes 
the poet or seer, an object of awe and terror, name- 
ly, that the same man, or society of men, may 
wear one aspect to themselves and their compan- 
ions, and a different aspect to higher intelligences. 
Certain priests, whom he describes as conversing 
very learnedly together, appeared to the children, 
who were at some distance, like dead horses : and 
many the like misappearances. And instantly the 
mind inquires, whether these fishes under the bridge, 
yonder oxen in the pasture, those dogs in the yard, 
are immutably fishes, oxen, and dogs, or only so 



40 ESSAY I. 

appear to me, and perchance to themselves appear 
upright men ; and whether I appear as a man to 
all eyes. The Bramins and Pythagoras propounded 
the same question, and if any poet has witnessed 
the transformation, he doubtless found it in har- 
mony with various experiences. We have all seen 
changes as considerable in wheat and caterpillars. 
He is the poet, and shall draw us with love and 
terror, who sees, through the flowing vest, the firm 
nature, and can declare it. 

I look in vain for the poet whom I describe. 
We do not, with sufficient plainness, or sufficient 
profoundness, address ourselves to life, nor dare we 
chaunt our own times and social circumstance. If 
we filled the day with bravery, we should not shrink 
from celebrating it. Time and nature yield us 
many gifts, but not yet the timely man, the new 
religion, the reconciler, whom all tilings await. 
Dante's praise is, that he dared to write his auto- 
biography in colossal cipher, or into universality. 
We have yet had no genius in America, with tyran- 
nous eye, which knew the value of our incompa- 
rable materials, and saw, in the barbarism and mate- 
rialism of the times, another carnival of the same 
gods whose picture he so much admires in Homer ; 
then in the middle age ; then in Calvinism. Banks 
and tariffs, the newspaper and caucus, methodism 
and unitarianism, are flat and dull to dull people, 



THE POET. 41 

but rest on the same foundations of wonder as the 
town of Troy, and the temple of Delphos, and are 
as swiftly passing away. Our logrolling, our stumps 
and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes, and 
Indians, our boats, and our repudiations, the wrath 
of rogues, and the pusillanimity of honest men, the 
northern trade, the southern planting, the western 
clearing, Oregon, and Texas, are yet unsung. Yet 
America is a poem in our eyes : its ample geography 
dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long 
for metres. If I have not found that excellent com- 
bination of gifts in my countrymen which I seek, 
neither could I aid myself to fix the idea of the 
poet by reading now and then in Chalmers's col- 
lection of five centuries of English poets. These 
are wits, more than poets, though there have been 
poets among them. But when we adhere to the 
ideal of the poet, we have our difficulties even with 
Milton and Homer. Milton is too literary, and 
Homer too literal and historical. 

But I am not wise enough for a national criti- 
cism, and must use the old largeness a little longer, 
to discharge my errand from the muse to the poet 
concerning his art. 

Art is the path of the creator to his work. The 

paths, or 'methods, are ideal and eternal, though 

few men ever see them, not the artist himself for 

years, or for a lifetime, unless he come into the 

A* 



42 ESSAY I. 

conditions. The painter, the sculptor, the com- 
poser, the epic rhapsodist, the orator, all partake one 
desire, namely, to express themselves symmetrically 
and abundantly, not dwarfishly and fragmentarily. 
They found or put themselves in certain conditions, 
as, the painter and sculptor before some impressive 
human figures; the orator, into the assembly of the 
people ; and the others, in such scenes as each has 
found exciting to his intellect ; and each presently 
feels the new desire. He hears a voice, he sees a 
beckoning. Then he is apprised, with wonder, what 
herds of daemons hem him in. He can no more 
rest ; he says, with the old painter, " By God, it is 
in me, and must go forth of me." He pursues a 
beauty, half seen, which flies before him. The 
poet pours out verses in every solitude. Most of 
the things he says are conventional, no doubt ; but 
by and by he says something which is original and 
beautiful. That charms him. He would say noth- 
ing else but such things. In our way of talking, 
we say, ' That is yours, this is mine ; ' but the poet 
knows well that it is not his ; that it is as strange 
and beautiful to him as to you ; he would fain hear 
the like eloquence at length. Once having tasted 
this immortal ichor, he cannot have enough of it, 
and, as an admirable creative power exists in these 
intellections, it is of the last importance that these 
things get spoken. What a little of all we know is 



THE POET. 43 

said ! What drops of all the sea of our science are 
baled up ! and by what accident it is that these are 
exposed, when so many secrets sleep in nature ! 
Hence the necessity of speech and song ; hence 
these throbs and heart-beatings in the orator, at 
the door of the assembly, to the end, namely, that 
thought may be ejaculated as Logos, or Word. 

Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say, ' It is in 
me, and shall out.' Stand there, balked and 
dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hoot- 
ed, stand and strive, until, at last, rage draw out of 
thee that dream-power which every night shows 
thee is thine own ; a power transcending all limit 
and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the 
conductor of the whole river of electricity. Noth- 
ing walks, or creeps, or grows, or exists, which 
must not in turn arise and walk before him as ex- 
ponent of his meaning. Comes he to that power, 
his genius is no longer exhaustible. All the crea- 
tures, by pairs and by tribes, pour into his mind as 
into a Noah's ark, to come forth again to people a 
new world. This is like the stock of air for our 
respiration, or for the combustion of our fireplace, 
not a measure of gallons, but the entire atmosphere 
if wanted. And therefore the rich poets, as Homer, 
Chaucer, Shakspeare, and Raphael, have obviously 
no limits to their works, except the limits of their 
lifetime, and resemble a mirror carried through the 



44 ESSAY I. 

street, ready to render an image of every created 
thing. 

O poet ! a new nobility is conferred in groves and 
pastures, and not in castles, or by the sword-blade, 
any longer. The conditions are hard, but equal. 
Thou shalt leave the world, and know the muse 
only. Thou shalt not know any longer the times, 
customs, graces, politics, or opinions of men, but 
shalt take all from the muse. For the time of 
towns is tolled from the world by funereal chimes, 
but in nature the universal hours are counted by 
succeeding tribes of animals and plants, and by 
growth of joy on joy. God wills also that thou 
abdicate a manifold and duplex life, and that thou 
be content that others speak for thee. Others shall 
be thy gentlemen, and shall represent all courtesy 
and worldly life for thee ; others shall do the great 
and resounding actions also. Thou shalt lie close 
hid with nature, and canst not be afforded to the 
Capitol or the Exchange. The world is full of re- 
nunciations and apprenticeships, and this is thine ; 
thou must pass for a fool and a churl for a long sea- 
son. This is the screen and sheath in which Pan 
has protected his well-beloved flower, and thou 
shalt be known only to thine own, and they shall 
console thee with tenderest love. And thou shalt 
not be able to rehearse the names of thy friends in 
thy verse, for an old shame before the holy ideal. 



THE POET. 45 

And this is the reward : that the ideal shall be real 
to thee, and the impressions of the actual world 
shall fall like summer rain, copious, but not trouble- 
some, to thy invulnerable essence. Thou shalt have 
the whole land for thy park and manor, the sea for 
thy bath and navigation, without tax and without 
envy ; the woods and the rivers thou shalt own ; 
and thou shalt possess that wherein others are only 
tenants and boarders. Thou true land-lord! sea- 
lord ! air-lord ! Wherever snow falls, or water flows, 
or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twi- 
light, wherever the blue he.iven is hung by clouds, 
or sown with stars, wherever are forms with trans- 
parent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial 
space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love, there 
is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and 
though thou shouldst walk the world over, thou 
shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or 
ignoble. 



EXPERIENCE. 



The lords of life, the lords of life, — 
I saw them pass, 
In their own guise, 
Like and unlike, 
Portly and grim, 
Use and Surprise, 
Surface and Dream, 
Succession swift, and spectral Wrong, 
Temperament without a tongue, 
And the inventor of the game 
Omnipresent without name ; — 
Some to see, some to be guessed, 
They marched from east to west : 
Little man, least of all, 
Among the legs of his guardians tall, 
Walked about with puzzled look : — 
Him by the hand dear Nature took ; 
Dearest Nature, strong and kind, 
Whispered, 4 Darling, never mind ! 
To-morrow they will wear another face, 
The founder thou ! these are thy race ! ' 



ESSAY II. 
EXPERIENCE. 



Where do we find ourselves ? In a series of 
which we do not know the extremes, and believe 
that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on 
a stair ; there are stairs below us, which we seem 
to have ascended ; there are stairs above us, many 
a one, which go upward and out of sight. But 
the Genius which, according to the old belief, stands 
at -the door by which we enter, and gives us the 
lethe to drink, that we may tell no tales, mixed the 
cup too strongly, and we cannot shake orT the 
lethargy now at noonday. Sleep lingers all our life- 
time about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the 
boughs of the fir-tree. All things swim and glitter. 
Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. 
Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not 
know our place again. Did our birth fall in some 
fit of indigence and frugality in nature, that she 
was so sparing of her fire and so liberal of her earth, 



50 ESSAY II. EXPERIENCE. 

that it appears to us that we lack the affirmative 
principle, and though we have health and reason, 
yet we have no superiluity of spirit for new crea- 
tion ? We have enough to live and bring the year 
about, but not an ounce to impart or to invest. Ah 
that our Genius were a little more of a genius ! 
We are like millers on the lower levels of a stream, 
when the factories above them have exhausted the 
water. We too fancy that the upper people must 
have raised their dams. 

If any of us knew what we were doing, or where 
we are going, then when we think we best know ! 
We do not know to-day whether we are busy or 
idle. In times when we thought ourselves indo- 
lent, we have afterwards discovered, that much was 
accomplished, and much was begun in us. All 
our days are so unprofitable while they pass, that 
'tis wonderful where or when we ever got anything 
of this which we call wisdom, poetry, virtue. We 
never got it on any dated calendar day. Some 
heavenly days must have been intercalated some- 
where, like those that Hermes won with dice of the 
Moon, that Osiris might be born. It is said, all 
martyrdoms looked mean when they were suffered. 
Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail 
in. Embark, and the romance quits our vessel, 
and hangs on every other sail in the horizon. Oar 
life looks trivial, and we shun to record it. Men 



ILLUSION. 51 

seem to have learned of the horizon the art of 
perpetual retreating and reference. 'Yonder up- 
lands are rich pasturage, and my neighbor has 
fertile meadow, but my field,' says the querulous 
farmer, 'only holds the world together.' I quote 
another man's saying ; unluckily, that other with- 
draws himself in the same way, and quotes me. 
'Tis the trick of nature thus to degrade to-day ; a 
good deal of buzz, and somewhere a result slipped 
magically in. Every roof is agreeable to the eye, 
until it is lifted; then we find tragedy and moan- 
ing women, and hard-eyed husbands, and deluges 
of lethe, and the men ask, ' What's the news ? ' as 
if the old were so bad. How many individuals can 
we count in society ? how many actions ? how 
many opinions ? So much of our time is prepara- 
tion, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, 
that the pith of each man's genius contracts itself 
to a very few hours. The history of literature, — 
take the net result of Tiraboschi, Warton, or Schle- 
gel, — is a sum of very few ideas, and of very few 
original tales, — all the rest being variation of these. 
So, in this great society wide lying around us, a 
critical analysis would find very few spontaneous 
actions. It is almost all custom and gross sense. 
There are even few opinions, and these seem or- 
ganic in the speakers, and do not disturb the uni- 
versal necessity. 



52 ESSAY II. EXPERIENCE. 

What opium is instilled into all disaster ! It 
shows formidable as we approach it, but there is at 
last no rough rasping friction, but the most slippery 
sliding surfaces: we fall soft on a thought: Ate 
Dea is gentle, 

" Over men's heads walking aloft, 
With tender feet treading so soft." 

People grieve and bemoan themselves, but it is not 
half so bad with them as they say. There are 
moods in which we court suffering, in the hope 
that here, at least, we shall find reality, sharp peaks 
and edges of truth. But it turns out to be scene- 
painting and counterfeit. The only thing grief 
has taught me, is to know how shallow it is. That, 
like all the rest, plays about the surface, and never 
introduces me into the reality, for contact with 
which, we would even pay the costly price of sons 
and lovers. Was it Boscovich who found out that 
bodies never come in contact? Well, souls never 
touch their objects. An innavigable sea washes 
with silent waves between us and the things we 
aim at and converse with. Grief too will make us 
idealists. In the death of my son, now more than 
two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful es- 
tate, — no more. I cannot get it nearer to me. If 
to-morrow I should be informed of the bankruptcy 



ILLUSION. 06 

of my principal debtors, the loss of my property 
would be a great inconvenience to me. perhaps, for 
many years ; but it would leave me as it found me, 
— neither better nor worse. So is it with this ca- 
lamity : it does not touch me ; something which I 
fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn 
away without tearing me, nor enlarged without en- 
riching me, falls off from me, and leaves no scar. 
It was caducous. I grieve that grief can teach me 
nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature. 
The Indian who was laid under a curse, that the 
wind should not blow on him, nor water flow to 
him, nor fire burn him, is a type of us all. The 
dearest events are summer-rain, and we the Para 
coats that shed every drop. Nothing is left us now 
but death. We look to that with a grim satisfac- 
tion, saying, there at least is reality that will not 
dodge us. 

I take this evanescence and lubricity of all ob- 
jects, which lets them slip through our fingers then 
when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhand- 
some part of our condition. Nature does not like 
to be observed, and likes that we should be her 
fools and playmates. We may have the sphere 
for our cricket-ball, but not a berry for our philoso- 
phy. Direct strokes she never gave us power to 
make ; all our blows glance, all our hits are acci- 
5* 



54 ESSAY II. EXPERIENCE. 

dents. Our relations to each other are oblique and 
casual. 

Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end 
to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string 
of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove 
to be many-colored lenses which paint the world 
their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its 
focus. From the mountain you see the mountain. 
We animate what we can, and we see only what we 
animate. Nature and books belong to the eyes that 
see them. It depends on the mood of the man, 
whether he shall see the sunset or the fine poem. 
There are always sunsets, and there is always gen- 
ius ; but only a few hours so serene that we can rel- 
ish nature or criticism. The more or less depends 
on structure or temperament. Temperament is the 
iron wire on which the beads are strung. Of what 
use is fortune or talent to a cold and defective na- 
ture ? Who cares what sensibility or discrimination 
a man has at some time shown, if he falls asleep 
in his chair? or if he laugh and giggle? or if he 
apologize? or is infected with egotism? or thinks 
of his dollar? or cannot go by food? or has gotten 
a child in his boyhood ? Of what use is genius, if 
the organ is too convex or too concave, and can- 
not find a focal distance within the actual horizon of 



TEMPERAMENT. OO 

human life ? Of what use, if the brain is too cold 
or too hot, and the man does not care enough for 
results, to stimulate him to experiment, and hold him 
up in it? or if the web is too finely woven, too 
irritable by pleasure and pain, so that life stagnates 
from too much reception, without due outlet? 
Of what use to make heroic vows of amend- 
ment, if the same old law-breaker is to keep them ? 
What cheer can the religious sentiment yield, when 
that is suspected to be secretly dependent on the 
seasons of the year, and the state of the blood ? I 
knew a witty physician who found the creed in the 
biliary duct, and used to affirm that if there was 
disease in the liver, the man became a Calvinist, 
and if that organ was sound, he became a Unita- 
rian. Very mortifying is the reluctant experience 
that some unfriendly excess or imbecility neutral- 
izes the promise of genius. We see young men 
who owe us a new world, so readily and lavishly 
they promise, but they never acquit the debt ; they 
die young and dodge the account : or if they live, 
they lose themselves in the crowd. 

Temperament also enters fully into the system 
of illusions, and shuts us in a prison of glass which 
we cannot see. There is an optical illusion about 
every person we meet. In truth, they are all crea- 
tures of given temperament, which will appear in a 
given character, whose boundaries they will never 



56 ESSAY II. EXPERIENCE. 

pass : but we look at them, they seem alive, and we 
presume there is impulse in them. In the moment 
it seems impulse ; in the year, in the lifetime, it 
turns out to be a certain uniform tune which the 
revolving barrel of the music-box must play. Men 
resist the conclusion in the morning, but adopt it 
as the evening wears on, that temper prevails over 
everything of time, place, and condition, and is in- 
consumable in the flames of religion. Some modi- 
fications the moral sentiment avails to impose, but 
the individual texture holds its dominion, if not 
to bias the moral judgments, yet to fix the measure 
of activity and of enjoyment. 

I thus express the law as it is read from the plat- 
form of ordinary life, but must not leave it without 
noticing the capital exception. For temperament 
is a power which no man willingly hears any one 
praise but himself. On the platform of physics, we 
cannot resist the contracting influences of so-called 
science. Temperament puts all divinity to rout. I 
know the mental proclivity of physicians. I hear 
the chuckle of the phrenologists. Theoretic kid- 
nappers and slave-drivers, they esteem each man 
the victim of another, who winds him round his 
finger by knowing the law of his being, and by 
such cheap signboards as the color of his beard, or 
the slope of his occiput, reads the inventory of his 
fortunes and character. The grossest ignorance 



TEMPERAMENT. 57 

does not disgust like this impudent knowingness. 
The physicians say, they are not materialists ; but 
they are: — Spirit is matter reduced to an extreme 
thinness: O so thin! — But the definition of spir- 
itual should be, that which is its own evidence. 
What notions do they attach to love ! what to reli- 
gion ! One would not willingly pronounce these 
words in their hearing, and give them the occasion 
to profane them. I saw a gracious gentleman who 
adapts his conversation to the form of the head of 
the man he talks with ! I had fancied that the value 
of life lay in its inscrutable possibilities; in the 
fact that I never know, in addressing myself to a 
new individual, what may befall me. I carry the 
keys of my castle in my hand, ready to throw them 
at the feet of my lord, whenever and in what dis- 
guise soever he shall appear. I know he is in the 
neighborhood hidden among vagabonds. Shall I 
preclude my future, by taking a high seat, and 
kindly adapting my conversation to the shape of 
heads? When I come to that, the doctors shall 

buy me for a cent. ' But, sir, medical history ; 

the report to the Institute ; the proven facts ! ' — I 
distrust the facts and the inferences. Temper- 
ament is the veto or limitation-power in the consti- 
tution, very justly applied to restrain an opposite 
excess in the constitution, but absurdly offered as a 
bar to original equity. When virtue is in presence, 



58 ESSAY II. EXPERIENCE. 

all subordinate powers sleep. On its own level, 01 
in view of nature, temperament is final. I see not, 
if one be once caught in this trap of so-called sci- 
ences, any escape for the man from the links of 
the chain of physical necessity. Given such an 
embryo, such a history must follow. On this plat- 
form, one lives in a sty of sensualism, and would 
soon come to suicide. But it is impossible that the 
creative power should exclude itself. Into every 
intelligence there is a door which is never closed, 
through which the creator passes. The intellect, 
seeker of absolute truth, or the heart, lover of 
absolute good, intervenes for our succor, and at one 
whisper of these high powers, we awake from inef- 
fectual struggles with this nightmare. We hurl it 
into its own hell, and cannot again contract our- 
selves to so base a state. 

The secret of the illusoriness is in the necessity 
of a succession of moods or objects. Gladly we 
would anchor, but the anchorage is quicksand. This 
onward trick of nature is too strong for us : Pero 
si muove. When, at night, I look at the moon and 
stars, I seem stationary, and they to hurry. Our 
love of the real draws us to permanence, but 
health of body consists in circulation, and sanity of 
mind in variety or facility of association. We need 
change of objects. Dedication to one thought is 



SUCCESSION. 59 

quickly odious. We house with the insane, and 
must humor them ; then conversation dies out. 
Once I took such delight in Montaigne, that I 
thought I should not need any other book ; before 
that, in Shakspeare ; then in. Plutarch ; then in Plo- 
tiuus ; at one time in Bacon ; afterwards in Goethe ; 
even in Bettine ; but now I turn the pages of either 
of them languidly, whilst I still cherish their genius. 
So with pictures ; each will bear an emphasis of 
attention once, which it cannot retain, though we 
fain would continue to be pleased in that manner. 
How strongly I have felt of pictures, that when 
you have seen one well, you must take your leave 
of it ; you shall never see it again. I have had 
good lessons from pictures, which I have since seen 
without emotion or remark. A deduction must be 
made from the opinion, which even the wise express 
on a new book or occurrence. Their opinion gives 
me tidings of their mood, and some vague guess 
at the new fact, but is nowise to be trusted as 
the lasting relation between that intellect and that 
tiling. The child asks, ' Mamma, why don't I like 
the story as well as when you told it me yester- 
day ? ' Alas, child, it is even so with the oldest 
cherubim of knowledge. But will it answer thy 
question to say, Because thou wert born to a whole, 
and this story is a particular ? The reason of the 
pain this discovery causes us (and we make it late 



60 ESSAY II. EXPERIENCE. 

in respect to works of art and intellect), is the 
plaint of tragedy which murmurs from it in regard 
to persons, to friendship and love. 

That immobility and absence of elasticity which 
we find in the arts, we find with more pain in the 
artist. There is no power of expansion in men. 
Our friends early appear to us as representatives of 
certain ideas, which they never pass or exceed. 
They stand on the brink of the ocean of thought 
and power, but they never take the single step that 
would bring them there. A man is like a bit of 
Labrador spar, which has no lustre as you turn it in 
your hand, until you come to a particular angle ; 
then it shows deep and beautiful colors. There is 
no adaptation or universal applicability in men, but 
each has his special talent, and the mastery of suc- 
cessful men consists in adroitly keeping themselves 
where and when that turn shall be oftenest to be 
practised. We do what we must, and call it by 
the best names we can, and would fain have the 
praise of having intended the result which ensues. 
I cannot recall any form of man who is not super- 
fluous sometimes. But is not this pitiful ? Life is 
not worth the taking, to do tricks in. 

Of course, it needs the whole society, to give the 
symmetry we seek. The parti-colored wheel must 
revolve very fast to appear white. Something is 
learned too by conversing with so much folly and 



SURFACE. 61 

defect. In fine, whoever loses, we are always of 
the gaining party. Divinity is behind our failures 
and follies also. The plays of children are non- 
sense, but very educative nonsense. So it is with 
the largest and solemnest things, with commerce, 
government, church, marriage, and so with the his- 
tory of every man's bread, and the ways by which 
he is to come by it. Like a bird which alights no- 
where, but hops perpetually from bough to bough, 
is the Power which abides in no man and in no 
woman, but for a moment speaks from this one, and 
for another moment from that one. 

But what help from these fineries or pedantries? 
What help from thought ? Life is not dialectics. 
We, I think, in these times, have had lessons 
enough of the futility of criticism. Our young 
people have thought and written much on labor 
and reform, and for all that they have written, 
neither the world nor themselves have got on a 
step. Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede 
muscular activity. If a man should consider the 
nicety of the passage of a piece of bread down 
his throat, he would starve. At Education-Farm, 
the noblest theory of life sat on the noblest figures 
of young men and maidens, quite powerless and 
melancholy. It would not rake or pitch a ton of 
hay ; it would not rub down a horse ; and the 
6 



62 ESSAY II. EXPERIENCE. 

men and maidens it left pale and hungry. A po- 
litical orator wittily compared our party promises 
to western roads, which opened stately enough, 
with planted trees on either side, to tempt the 
traveller, but soon became narrow and narrower, 
and ended in a squirrel-track, and ran up a tree. 
So does culture with us ; it ends in headache. 
Unspeakably sad and barren does life look to 
those, who a few months ago were dazzled with 
the splendor of the promise of the times. " There 
is now no longer any right course of action, nor 
any self-devotion left among the Iranis." Objec- 
tions and criticism we have had our fill of. There 
are objections to every course of life and action, 
and the practical wisdom infers an indifferency, 
from the omnipresence of objection. The whole 
frame of things preaches indifferency. Do not 
craze yourself with thinking, but go about your 
business anywhere. Life is not intellectual or 
critical, but sturdy. Its chief good is for well- 
mixed people who can enjoy what they find, 
without question. Nature hates peeping, and our 
mothers speak her very sense when they say, 
"Children, eat your victuals, and say no more of 
it." To fill the hour, — that is happiness; to fill 
the hour, and leave no crevice for a repentance or 
an approval. We live amid surfaces, and the true 
art of life is to skate well on them. Under the 



SURFACE. 63 

oldest mouldiest conventions, a man of native 
force prospers just as well as in the newest world, 
and that by skill of handling and treatment. He 
can take hold anywhere. Life itself is a mixture 
of power and form, and will not bear the least ex- 
cess of either. To finish the moment, to find the 
journey's end in every step of the road, to live the 
greatest number of good hours, is wisdom. It is 
not the part of men, but of fanatics, or of mathe- 
maticians, if you will, to say, that, the shortness 
of life considered, it is not worth caring whether 
for so short a duration we were sprawling in want, 
or sitting high. Since our office is with moments, 
let us husband them. Five minutes of to-day are 
worth as much to me, as five minutes in the next 
millennium. Let us be poised, and wise, and our 
own, to-day. Let us treat the men and women 
well : treat them as if they were real : perhaps they 
are. Men live in their fancy, like drunkards whose 
hands are too soft and tremulous for successful labor. 
It is a tempest of fancies, and the only ballast I 
know, is a respect to the present hour. Without 
any shadow of doubt, amidst this vertigo of shows 
and politics, I settle myself ever the firmer in the 
creed, that we should not postpone and refer and 
wish, but do broad justice where we are, by whom- 
soever we deal with, accepting our actual compan- 
ions and circumstances, however humble or odious, 



64 ESSAY II. EXPERIENCE. 

as the mystic officials to whom the universe has 
delegated its whole pleasure for us. If these are 
mean and malignant, their contentment, which is 
the last victory of justice, is a more satisfying echo 
to the heart, than the voice of poets and the casual 
sympathy of admirable persons. I think that how- 
ever a thoughtful man may suffer from the defects 
and absurdities of his company, he cannot without 
affectation deny to any set of men and women, a 
sensibility to extraordinary merit. The coarse and 
frivolous have an instinct of superiority, if they 
have not a sympathy, and honor it in their blind 
capricious way with sincere homage. 

The fine young people despise life, but in me, 
and in such as with me are free from dyspepsia, and 
to whom a day is a sound and solid good, it is a 
great excess of politeness to look scornful and to 
cry for company. I am grown by sympathy a lit- 
tle eager and sentimental, but leave me alone, and 
I should relish every hour and what it brought me, 
the potluck of the day, as heartily as the oldest gos- 
sip in the bar-room. I am thankful for small mer- 
cies. I compared notes with one of my friends 
who expects everything of the universe, and is dis- 
appointed when anything is less than the best, and 
I found that I begin at the other extreme, expect- 
ing nothing, and am always full of thanks for 
moderate goods. I accept the clangor and jangle 



SURFACE. 65 

of contrary tendencies. I find my account in sots 
and bores also. They give a reality to the circum- 
jacent picture, which such a vanishing meteorous 
appearance can ill spare. In the morning I awake, 
and find the old world, wife, babes, and mother, 
Concord and Boston, the dear old spiritual world, 
and even the dear old devil not far off. If we will 
take the good we find, asking no questions, we 
shall have heaping measures. The great gifts are 
not got by analysis. Everything good is on the 
highway. The middle region of our being is the 
temperate zone. We may climb into the thin and 
cold realm of pure geometry and lifeless science, or 
sink into that of sensation. Between these ex- 
tremes is the equator of life, of thought, of spirit, 
of poetry, — a narrow belt. Moreover, in popular 
experience, everything good is on the highway. 
A collector peeps into all the picture-shops of 
Europe, for a landscape of Poussin, a crayon-sketch 
of Salvator ; but the Transfiguration, the Last 
Judgment, the Communion of St. Jerome, and 
what are as transcendent as these, are on the walls 
of the Vatican, the Uffizii, or the Louvre, where 
every footman may see them ; to say nothing of 
nature's pictures in every street, of sunsets and sun- 
rises every day, and the sculpture of the human 
body never absent. A collector recently bought at 
public auction, in London, for one hundred and fif- 
6* 



66 ESSAY II. EXPERIENCE. 

ty-seven guineas, an autograph of Shakspeare : but 
for nothing a school-boy can read Hamlet, and can 
detect secrets of highest concernment yet unpub- 
lished therein. I think I will never read any but 
the commonest books, — the Bible, Homer, Dante, 
Shakspeare, and Milton. Then we are impatient 
of so public a life and planet, and run hither and 
thither for nooks and secrets. The imagination 
delights in the woodcraft of Indians, trappers, and 
bee-hunters. We fancy that we are strangers, and 
not so intimately domesticated in the planet as the 
wild man, and the wild beast and bird. But the 
exclusion reaches them also ; reaches the climbing, 
flying, gliding, feathered and four-footed man. 
Fox and woodchuck, hawk and snipe, and bittern, 
when nearly seen, have no more root in the deep 
world than man, and are just such superficial ten- 
ants of the globe. Then the new molecular phi- 
losophy shows astronomical interspaces betwixt 
atom and atom, shows that the world is all out- 
side : it has no inside. 

The mid-world is best. Nature, as we know 
her, is no saint. The lights of the church, the as- 
cetics, Gentoos and corn-eaters, she does not dis- 
tinguish by any favor. She comes eating and 
drinking and sinning. Her darlings, the great, the 
strong, the beautiful, are not children of our law, 
do not come out of the Sunday School, nor weigh 



SURFACE. 67 

their food, nor punctually keep the commandments. 
If we will be strong with her strength, we must 
not harbor such disconsolate consciences, borrowed 
too from the consciences of other nations. We 
must set up the strong present tense against all the 
rumors of wrath, past or to come. So many things 
are unsettled which it is of the first importance to 
settle, — and, pending their settlement, we will do 
as we do. Whilst the debate goes forward on the 
equity of commerce, and will not be closed for a 
century or two, New and Old England may keep 
shop. Law of copyright and international copy- 
right is to be discussed, and, in the interim, we 
will sell our books for the most we can. Expedi- 
ency of literature, reason of literature, lawfulness 
of writing down a thought, is questioned ; much is 
to say on both sides, and, while the fight waxes hot, 
thou, dearest scholar, stick to thy foolish task, add 
a line every hour, and between whiles add a line. 
Right to hold land, right of property, is disputed, 
and the conventions convene, and before the vote 
is taken, dig away in your garden, and spend your 
earnings as a waif or godsend to all serene and 
beautiful purposes. Life itself is a bubble and a 
skepticism, and a sleep within a sleep. Grant it, 
and as much more as they will, — but thou, God's 
darling ! heed thy private dream : thou wilt not be 
missed in the scorning and skepticism : there are 



68 ESSAY II. EXPERIENCE. 

enough of them : stay there in thy closet, and toil, 
until the rest are agreed what to do about it. Thy 
sickness, they say, and thy puny habit, require that 
thou do this or avoid that, but know that thy life 
is a flitting state, a tent for a night, and do thou, 
sick or well, finish that stint. Thou art sick, but 
shalt not be worse, and the universe, which holds 
thee dear, shall be the better. 

Human life is made up of the two elements, 
power and form, and the proportion must be inva- 
riably kept, if we would have it sweet and sound. 
Each of these elements in excess makes a mischief 
as hurtful as its defect. Everything runs to ex- 
cess : every good quality is noxious, if unmixed, 
and, to carry the danger to the edge of ruin, nature 
causes each man's peculiarity to superabound. 
Here, among the farms, we adduce the scholars as 
examples of this treachery. They are nature's vic- 
tims of expression. You who see the artist, the 
orator, the poet, too near, and find their life no 
more excellent than that of mechanics or farmers, 
and themselves victims of partiality, very hollow 
and haggard, and pronounce them failures, — not 
heroes, but quacks, — conclude very reasonably, 
that these arts are not for man, but are disease. 
Yet nature will not bear you out. Irresistible na- 
ture made men such, and makes legions more of 
such, every day. You love the boy reading in a 



SURPRISE. 69 

book, gazing at a drawing, or a cast : yet what are 
these millions who read and behold, but incipient 
writers and sculptors? Add a little more of that 
quality which now reads and sees, and they will 
seize the pen and chisel. And if one remembers 
how innocently he began to be an artist, he per- 
ceives that nature joined with his enemy. A man 
is a golden impossibility. The line he must walk 
is a hair's breadth. The wise through excess of 
wisdom is made a fool. 

How easily, if fate would suffer it, we might 
keep forever these beautiful limits, and adjust our- 
selves, once for all, to the perfect calculation of the 
kingdom of known cause and effect. In the street 
and in the newspapers, life appears so plain a busi- 
ness, that manly resolution and adherence to the 
multiplication-table through all weathers, will in- 
sure success. But ah ! presently comes a day, or is 
it only a half-hour, with its angel-whispering, — 
which discomfits the conclusions of nations and of 
years ! To-morrow again, every thing looks real 
and angular, the habitual standards are reinstated, 
common sense is as rare as genius, — is the basis 
of genius, and experience is hands and feet to every 
enterprise ; — and yet, he who should do his busi- 
ness on this understanding, would be quickly bank- 
rupt. Power keeps quite another road than the 



70 ESSAY II. EXPERIENCE. 

turnpikes of choice and will, namely, the subter- 
ranean and invisible tunnels and channels of life. 
It is ridiculous that we are diplomatists, and doc- 
tors, and considerate people : there are no dupes 
like these. Life is a series of surprises, and would 
not be worth taking or keeping, if it were not. 
God delights to isolate us every day, and hide from 
us the past and the future. We would look about 
us, but with grand politeness he draws down before 
us an impenetrable screen of purest sky, and another 
behind us of purest sky. ' You will not remember,' 
he seems to say, 'and you will not expect.' All 
good conversation, manners, and action, come from 
a spontaneity which forgets usages, and makes 
the moment great. Nature hates calculators ; her 
methods are saltatory and impulsive. Man lives by 
pulses ; our organic movements are such ; and the 
chemical and ethereal agents are undulatory and 
alternate ; and the mind goes antagonizing on, and 
never prospers but by fits. We thrive by casual- 
ties. Our chief experiences have been casual. The 
most attractive class of people are those who are 
powerful obliquely, and not by the direct stroke : 
men of genius, but not yet accredited : one gets 
the cheer of their light, without paying too great a 
tax. Theirs is the beauty of the bird, or the morn- 
ing light, and not of art. In the thought of genius 
there is always a surprise ; and the moral sentiment 



SURPRISE. 71 

is well called " the newness," for it is never other ; 
as new to the oldest intelligence as to the young 
child, — "the kingdom that conieth without obser- 
vation." In like manner, for practical success, 
there must not be too much design. A man will 
not be observed in doing that which he can do 
best. There is a certain magic about his properest 
action, which stupefies your powers of observation, 
so that though it is done before you, you wist not 
of it. The art of life has a pudency, and will not 
be exposed. Every man is an impossibility, until 
he is born ; every thing impossible, until we see a 
success. The ardors of piety agree at last with the 
coldest skepticism, — that nothing is of us or our 
works. — that all is of God. Nature will not spare 
us the smallest leaf of laurel. All writing comes by 
the grace of God, and all doing and having. I 
would gladly be moral, and keep due metes and 
bounds, which I dearly love, and allow the most to 
the will of man, but I have set my heart on honesty 
in this chapter, and I can see nothing at last, in 
success or failure, than more or less of vital force 
supplied from the Eternal. The results of life are 
uncalculated and uncalculable. The years teach 
much which the days never know. The persons 
who compose our company, converse, and come and 
go, and design and execute many things, and some- 
what comes of it all, but an unlooked for result. 



72 ESSAY II. EXPERIENCE. 

The individual is always mistaken. He designed 
many things, and drew in other persons as coadju- 
tors, quarrelled with some or all, blundered much, 
and something is done ; all are a little advanced, 
but the individual is always mistaken. It turns out 
somewhat new, and very unlike what he promised 
himself. 

The ancients, struck with this irreducibleness of 
the elements of human life to calculation, exalted 
Chance into a divinity, but that is to stay too long 
at the spark, — which glitters truly at one point, — 
but the universe is warm with the latency of the 
same fire. The miracle of life which will not be 
expounded, but will remain a miracle, introduces a 
new element. In the growth of the embryo, Sir 
Everard Home, I think, noticed that the evolution 
was not from one central point, but coactive from 
three or more points. Life has no memory. That 
which proceeds in succession might be remembered, 
but that which is coexistent, or ejaculated from a 
deeper cause, as yet far from being conscious, 
knows not its own tendency. So is it with us, 
now skeptical, or without unity, because immersed 
in forms and effects all seeming to be of equal yet 
hostile value, and now religious, whilst in the 
reception of spiritual law. Bear with these distrac- 
tions, with this coetaneous growth of the parts : 



REALITY. 73 

' they will one day be members, and obey one will. 

' On that one will, on that secret canse, they nail our 
attention and hope. Life is hereby melted into an 
expectation or a religion. Underneath the inharmo- 
nious and trivial particulars, is a musical perfection, 
the Ideal journeying always with us, the heaven 
without rent or seam. Do but observe the mode 
of our illumination. When I converse with a pro- 
found mind, or if at any time being alone I have 
good thoughts, I do not at once arrive at satisfac- 
tions, as when, being thirsty, I drink water, or go 
to the fire, being cold : no ! but I am at first ap- 
prised of my vicinity to a new and excellent region 
of life. By persisting to read or to think, this 
region gives further sign of itself, as it were in 
flashes of light, in sudden discoveries of its pro- 
found beauty and repose, as if the clouds that 
covered it parted at intervals, and showed the ap- 
proaching traveller the inland mountains, with the 
tranquil eternal meadows spread at their base, 
whereon flocks graze, and shepherds pipe and 
dance. Bnt every insight from this realm of 
thought is felt as initial, and promises a sequel. I 
do not make it ; I arrive there, and behold what 
was there already. I make ! O no ! I clap my 
hands in infantine joy and amazement, before the 
first opening to me of this august magnificence, old 
with the love and homage of innumerable ages, 
7 



74 ESSAY II. EXPERIENCE. 

young with the life of life, the sunbright Mecca of 
the desert. And what a future it opens ! I feel 
a new heart beating with the love of the new beauty. 
I am ready to die out of nature, and be born again 
into this new yet unapproachable America I have 
found in the West. 

" Since neither now nor yesterday began 
These thoughts, which have been ever, nor yet can 
A man be found who their first entrance knew." 

If I have described life as a flux of moods, I must 
now add, that there is that in us which changes 
not, and which ranks all sensations and states of 
mind. The consciousness in each man is a sliding 
scale, which identifies him now with the First 
Cause, and now with the flesh of his body; life 
above life, in infinite degrees. The sentiment from 
which it sprung determines the dignity of any deed, 
and the question ever is, not, what you have done 
or forborne, but, at whose command you have done 
or forborne it. 

Fortune, Minerva, Muse, Holy Ghost, — these 
are quaint names, too narrow to cover this un- 
bounded substance. The baffled intellect must still 
kneel before this cause, which refuses to be named, 
— ineffable cause, which every fine genius has es- 
sayed to represent by some emphatic symbol, as, 
Thales by water, Anaximenes by air, Anaxagoras 



KEALITY. 75 

] by (Nous) thought, Zoroaster by fire, Jesus and the 
i moderns by love : and the metaphor of each has 
become a national religion. The Chinese Mencius 
[ has not been the least successful in his general iza- 
tion. " I fully understand language," he said, "and 
nourish well my vast-flowing vigor." — "I beg to 
ask what you call vast-flowing vigor ? " — said his 
companion. " The explanation," replied Mencius, 
" is difficult. This vigor is supremely great, and 
in the highest degree unbending. Nourish it cor- 
rectly, and do it no injury, and it will fill up the 
vacancy between heaven and earth. This vigor ac- 
cords with and assists justice and reason, and leaves 
no hunger." — In our more correct writing, we 
give to this generalization the name of Being, and 
thereby confess that we have arrived as far as we 
can go. Suffice it for the joy of the universe, that 
we have not arrived at a wall, but at interminable 
oceans. Our life seems not present, so much as 
prospective ; not for the affairs on which it is wast- 
ed, but as a hint of this vast-flowing vigor. Most 
of life seems to be mere advertisement of faculty : 
information is given us not to sell ourselves cheap ; 
that we are very great. So, in particulars, our great- 
ness is always in a tendency or direction, not in an 
action. It is for us to believe in the rule, not in 
the exception. The noble are thus known from 
the ignoble. So in accepting the leading of the 



76 ESSAY II. EXPERIENCE. 

sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning 
the immortality of the soul, or the like, bat the uni- 
versal impulse to believe, that is the material circum- 
stance, and is the principal fact in the history of the 
globe. Shall we describe this cause as that which 
works directly ? The spirit is not helpless or need- 
ful of mediate organs. It has plentiful powers and 
direct effects. I am explained without explaining, 
I am felt without acting, and where I am not. There- 
fore all just persons are satisfied with their own 
praise. They refuse to explain themselves, and are 
content that new actions should do them that of- 
fice. They believe that we communicate without 
speech, and above speech, and that no right action 
of ours is quite unaffecting to our friends, at what- 
ever distance ; for the influence of action is not to 
be measured by miles. Why should I fret myself, 
because a circumstance has occurred, which hinders 
my presence where I was expected ? If I am not 
at the meeting, my presence where I am, should be 
as useful to the commonwealth of friendship and 
wisdom, as would be my presence in that place. 1 
exert the same quality of power in all places. 
Thus journeys the mighty Ideal before us ; it never 
was known to fall into the rear. No man ever 
came to an experience which was satiating, but his 
good is tidings of a better. Onward and onward! 
In liberated moments, we know that a new picture 



SUBJECT OR THE ONE. 77 

of life and duty is already possible ; the elements 
already exist in many minds around you, of a doc- 
trine of life which shall transcend any written rec- 
ord we have. The new statement will comprise 
the skepticisms, as well as the faiths of society, 
and out of unbeliefs a creed shall be formed. For, 
skepticisms are not gratuitous or lawless, but are 
limitations of the affirmative statement, and the 
new philosophy must take them in, and make affir- 
mations outside of them, just as much as it must 
include the oldest beliefs. 

It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the 
discovery we have made, that we exist. That dis- 
covery is called the Fall of Man. Ever afterwards, 
we suspect our instruments. We have learned that 
we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we 
have no means of correcting these colored and 
distorting lenses which we are, or of computing 
the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject- 
lenses have a creative power ; perhaps there are no 
objects. Once we lived in what we saw; now, 
the rapaciousness of this new power, which threat- 
ens to absorb all things, engages us. Nature, art, 
persons, letters, religions, — objects, sucessively 
tumble in, and God is but one of its ideas. Nature 
and literature are subjective phenomena; every 

evil and every good thing is a shadow which we 

7 # 



78 ESSAY II. EXPERIENCE. 

cast. The street is full of humiliations to the 
proud. As the fop contrived to dress his bailiffs in 
his livery, and make them wait on his guests at 
table, so the chagrins which the bad heart gives 
off as bubbles, at once take form as ladies and 
gentlemen in the street, shopmen or bar-keepers in 
hotels, and threaten or insult whatever is threaten- 
able and insultable in us. 'Tis the same with our 
idolatries. People forget that it is the eye which 
makes the horizon, and the rounding mind's eye 
which makes this or that man a type or representa- 
tive of humanity with the name of hero or saint. 
Jesus the " providential man," is a good man on 
whom many people are agreed that these optical 
laws shall take effect. By love on one part, and 
by forbearance to press objection on the other part, 
it is for a time settled, that we will look at him in 
the centre of the horizon, and ascribe to him the 
properties that will attach to any man so seen. 
But the longest love or aversion has a speedy term. 
The great and crescive self, rooted in absolute na- 
ture, supplants all relative existence, and ruins the 
kingdom of mortal friendship and love. Marriage 
(in what is called the spiritual world) is impossible, 
because of the inequality between every subject 
and every object. The subject is the receiver of 
Godhead, and at every comparison must feel his 
being enhanced by that cryptic might. Though 



SUBJECT OR THE ONE. 79 

not in energy, yet by presence, this magazine of 
substance cannot be otherwise than felt : nor can 
any force of intellect attribute to the object the 
proper deity which sleeps or wakes forever in every 
subject. Never can love make consciousness and 
ascription equal in force. There will be the same 
gulf between every me and thee, as between the 
original and the picture. The universe is the bride 
of the soul. All private sympathy is partial. Two 
human beings are like globes, which can touch 
ouly in a point, and, whilst they remain in contact, 
all other points of each of the spheres are inert ; 
their turn must also come, and the longer a partic- 
ular union lasts, the more energy of appetency the 
parts not in union acquire. 

Life will be imaged, but cannot be divided nor 
doubled. Any invasion of its unity would be 
chaos. The soul is not twin-born, but the only 
begotten, and though revealing itself as child in 
time, child in appearance, is of a fatal and universal 
power, admitting no co-life. Every day, every act 
betrays the ill-concealed deity. We believe in our- 
selves, as we do not believe in others. We permit 
all things to ourselves, and. that which we call sin 
in others, is experiment for us. It is an instance 
of our faith in ourselves, that men never speak of 
crime as lightly as they think : or, every man 
thinks a latitude safe for himself, which is nowise 



80 ESSAY II. EXPERIENCE. 

to be indulged to another. The act looks very dif- 
ferently on the inside, and on the outside ; in its 
quality, and in its consequences. Murder in the 
murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and 
romancers will have it ; it does not unsettle him, or 
fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles : it is 
an act quite easy to be contemplated, but in its 
sequel, it turns out to be a horrible jangle and con- 
founding of all relations. Especially the crimes 
that spring from love, seem right and fair from the 
actor's point of view, but, when acted, are found 
destructive of society. No man at last believes 
that he can be lost, nor that the crime in him is as 
black as in the felon. Because the intellect qual- 
ifies in our own case the moral judgments. For 
there is no crime to the intellect. That is antino- 
mian or hypernomian, and judges law as well as 
fact. " It is worse than a crime, it is a blunder," 
said Napoleon, speaking the language of the intel- 
lect. To it, the world is a problem in mathematics 
or the science of quantity, and it leaves out praise 
and blame, and all weak emotions. All stealing is 
comparative. If you come to absolutes, pray who 
does not steal ? Saints are sad, because they behold 
sin, (even when they speculate,) from the point of 
view of the conscience, and not of the intellect ; 
a confusion of thought. Sin seen from the thought, 
is a diminution or less : seen from the conscience 



SUBJECT OR THE ONE. 81 

or will, it is pravity or bad. The intellect names it 
shade, absence of light, and no essence. The con- 
science must feel it as essence, essential evil. This 
it is not : it has an objective existence, but no 
subjective. 

Thus inevitably does the universe wear our color, 
and every object fall successively into the subject 
itself. The subject exists, the subject enlarges ; 
all things sooner or later fall into place. As I am, 
so I see ; use what language we will, we can never 
say any thing but what we are ; Hermes, Cadmus, 
Columbus, Newton, Bonaparte, are the mind's 
ministers. Instead of feeling a poverty when we 
encounter a great man, let us treat the new comer 
like a travelling geologist, who passes through our 
estate, and shows us good slate, or limestone, or 
anthracite, in our brush pasture. The partial action 
of each strong mind in one direction, is a telescope 
for the objects on which it is pointed. But every 
other part of knowledge is to be pushed to the 
same extravagance, ere the soul attains her due 
sphericity. Do you see that kitten chasing so 
prettily her own tail ? If you could look with her 
eyes, you might see her surrounded with hundreds 
of figures performing complex dramas, with tragic 
and comic issues, long conversations, many charac- 
ters, many ups and downs of fate, — and meantime 
it is only puss and her tail. How long before our 



82 ESSAY II. EXPEIRENCE. 

masquerade will end its noise of tambourines, laugh- 
ter, and shouting, and we shall find it was a solitary" 
performance ? — A subject and an object, — it takes 
so much to make the galvanic circuit complete, but 
magnitude adds nothing. What imports it whether 
it is Kepler and the sphere ; Columbus and Amer- 
ica ; a reader and his book ; or puss with, her tail ? 

It is true that all the muses and love and religion 
hate these developments, and will find a way to 
punish the chemist, who publishes in the parlor the 
secrets of the laboratory. And we cannot say too 
little of our constitutional necessity of seeing things 
under private aspects, or saturated with our humors. 
And yet is the God the native of these bleak rocks. 
That need makes in morals the capital virtue of 
self-trust. We must hold hard to this poverty, 
however scandalous, and by more vigorous self- 
recoveries, after the sallies of action, possess our 
axis more firmly. The life of truth is cold, and so 
far mournful ; but it is not the slave of tears, con- 
tritions, and perturbations. It does not attempt 
another's work, nor adopt another's facts. It is a 
main lesson of wisdom to know your own from 
another's. I have learned that I cannot dispose of 
other people's facts; but I possess such a key to 
my own, as persuades me against all their denials, 
that they also have a key to theirs. A sympathetic 
person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer 



EXPERIENCE. 83 

among drowning men, who all catch at him, and 
if he give so much as a leg or a finger, they will 
drown him. They wish to be saved from the mis- 
chiefs of their vices, but not from their vices. 
Charity would be wasted on this poor waiting on 
the symptoms. A wise and hardy physician will 
say, Come out of that, as the first condition of ad- 
vice. 

In this our talking America, we are ruined by 
our good nature and listening on all sides. This 
compliance takes away the power of being greatly 
useful. A man should not be able to look other 
than directly and forthright. A preoccupied atten- 
tion is the only answer to the importunate frivolity 
of other people : an attention, and to an aim which 
makes their wants frivolous. This is a divine 
answer, and leaves no appeal, and no hard thoughts. 
In Flaxman's drawing of the Eumenides of 
iEschylus, Orestes supplicates Apollo, whilst the 
Furies sleep on the threshold. The face of the 
god expresses a shade of regret and compassion, 
but calm with the conviction of the irreconcilable- 
ness of the two spheres. He is born into other poli- 
tics, into the eternal and beautiful. The man at his 
feet asks for his interest in turmoils of the earth, 
into which his nature cannot enter. And the 
Eumenides there lying express pictorially this dis- 



84 ESSAY II. 

parity. The god is surcharged with his divine des- 
tiny. 

Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Sur- 
prise, Reality, Subjectiveness, — these are threads 
on the loom of time, these are the lords of life. 
I dare not assume to give their order, but I name 
them as I find them in my way. I know better 
than to claim any completeness for my picture. I 
am a fragment, and this is a fragment of me. I can 
very confidently announce one or another law, 
which throws itself into relief and form, but I am 
too young yet by some ages to compile a code. I 
gossip for my hour concerning the eternal politics. 
I have seen many fair pictures not in vain. A won- 
derful time I have lived in. I am not the novice I 
was fourteen, nor yet seven years ago. Let who 
will ask, where is the fruit ? I find a private fruit 
sufficient. This is a fruit, — that I should not ask 
for a rash effect from meditations, counsels, and the 
hiving of truths. I should feel it pitiful to demand 
a result on this town and county, an overt effect on 
the instant month and year. The effect is deep 
and secular as the cause. It works on periods in 
which mortal lifetime is lost. All I know is recep- 
tion ; I am and I have : but I do not get, and when 
I have fancied I, had gotten anything, I found I did 



EXPERIENCE. OO 

not. I worship with wonder the great Fortune. 
My reception has been so large, that I am not an- 
noyed by receiving this or that superabundantly. 
1 say to the Genius, if he will pardon the proverb, 
In for a mill, in for a million. When I receive a 
new gift, I do not macerate my body to make the 
account square, for, if I should die, I could not 
make the account square. The benefit overran the 
merit the first day, and has overran the merit ever 
since. The merit itself, so-called, I reckon part of 
the receiving. 

Also, that hankering after an overt or practical 
effect seems to me an apostasy. In good earnest, 
I am willing to spare this most unnecessary deal of 
doing. Life wears to me a visionary face. Hard- 
est, roughest action is visionary also. It is but a 
choice between soft and turbulent dreams. People 
disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and 
urge doing. I am very content with knowing, if 
only I could know. That is an august entertain- 
ment, and would suffice me a great while. To 
know a little, would be worth the expense of this 
world. I hear always the law of Adrastia, " that 
every soul which had acquired any truth, should 
be safe from harm until another period." 

I know that the world I converse with in the 
city and in the farms, is not the world I think. I 



86 ESSAY II. 

observe that difference, and shall observe it. One 
day, I shall know the value and law of this dis- 
crepance. Bnt I have not found that much was 
gained by manipular attempts to realize the world 
of thought. Many eager persons successively make 
an experiment in this way, and make themselves 
ridiculous. They acquire democratic manners, 
they foam at the mouth, they hate and deny. 
Worse, I observe, that, in the history of mankind, 
there is never a solitary example of success, — 
taking their own tests of success. I say this polem- 
ically, or in reply to the inquiry, why not realize 
your world ? But far be from me the despair 
which prejudges the law by a paltry empiricism, — 
since there never was a right endeavor, but it suc- 
ceeded. Patience and patience, we shall win at 
the last. We must be very suspicious of the decep- 
tions of the element of time. It takes a good deal 
of time to eat or to sleep, or to earn a hundred dol- 
lars, and a very little time to entertain a hope and 
an insight which becomes the light of our life. We 
dress our garden, eat our dinners, discuss the house- 
hold with our wives, and these things make no 
impression, are forgotten next week ; but in the 
solitude to which every man is always returning, 
he has a sanity and revelations, which in his pas- 
sage into new worlds he will carry with him. 



EXPERIENCE. 87 

Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat : 
up again, old heart ! — it seems to say, — there is 
victory yet for all justice ; and the true romance 
which the world exists to realize, will be the trans- 
formation of genius into practical power. 



CHARACTER. 



The sun set ; but set not his hope : 
Stars rose ; his faith was earlier up : 
Fixed on the enormous galaxy, 
Deeper and older seemed his eye : 
And matched his sufferance sublime 
The taciturnity of time. 
lie spoke, and words more soft than ram 
Brought the Age of Gold again : 
His action won such reverence sweet, 
As hid all measure of the feat. 
8 * 



Work of his hand 
lie nor commends nor grieves 
Pleads for itself the fact ; 
As unrepenting Nature leaves 
Her every act. 



ESSAY III. 
CHARACTER. 



I have read that those who listened to Lord 
Chatham felt that there was something finer in the 
man, than any thing which he said. It has been com- 
plained of onr brilliant English historian of the 
French Revolution, that when he has told all his facts 
about Mirabeau, they do not justify his estimate of 
his genius. The Gracchi, Agis, Cleomenes, and 
others of Plutarch's heroes, do not in the record of 
facts equal their own fame. Sir Philip Sidney, the 
Earl of Essex, Sir Walter Raleigh, are men of great 
figure, and of few deeds. We cannot find the small- 
est part of the personal weight of Washington, in 
the narrative of his exploits. The authority of the 
name of Schiller is too great for his books. This 
inequality of the reputation to the works or the an- 
ecdotes, is not accounted for by saying that the 
reverberation is longer than the thunder-clap ; but 
somewhat resided in these men which begot an 



92 ESSAY III. 

expectation that outran all their performance. The 
largest part of their power was latent. This is 
that which we call Character, — a reserved force 
which acts directly by presence, and without 
means. It is conceived of as a certain undemonstra- 
ble force, a Familiar or Genius, by whose impulses 
the man is guided, but whose counsels he cannot 
impart ; which is company for him, so that such 
men are often solitary, or if they chance to be 
social, do not need society, but can entertain them- 
selves very well alone. The purest literary talent 
appears at one time great, at another time small, but 
character is of a stellar and undiminishable great- 
ness. What others effect by talent or by eloquence, 
this man accomplishes by some magnetism. " Half 
his strength he put not forth." His victories are by 
demonstration of superiority, and not by crossing 
of bayonets. He conquers, because his arrival 
alters the face of affairs. ' " O Iole ! how did you 
know that Hercules was a god ? " " Because," an- 
swered Iole, " I was content the moment my eyes 
fell on him. When I beheld Theseus, I desired 
that I might see him offer battle, or at least guide 
his horses in the chariot-race ; but Hercules did 
not wait for a contest ; he conquered whether he 
stood, or walked, or sat, or whatever thing he 
did." ' Man, ordinarily a pendant to events, only 
half attached, and that awkwardly, to the world he 



CHARACTER. 93 

lives in, in these examples appears to share the life 
of things, and to be an expression of the same 
laws which control the tides and the sun, numbers 
and quantities. 

But to use a more modest illustration, and nearer 
home, I observe, that in our political elections, 
where this element, if it appears at all, can only 
occur in its coarsest form, we sufficiently under- 
stand its incomparable rate. The people know 
that they need in their representative much more 
than talent, namely, the power to make his talent 
trusted. They cannot come at their ends by send- 
ing to Congress a learned, acute, and fluent speaker, 
if he be not one, who, before he was appointed by 
the people to represent them, was appointed by Al- 
mighty God to stand for a fact, — invincibly per- 
suaded of that fact in himself, — so that the most 
confident and the most violent persons learn that 
here is resistance on which both impudence and 
terror are wasted, namely, faith in a fact. The 
men who carry their points do not need to inquire 
of their consitutents what they should say, but are 
themselves the country which they represent : no- 
where are its emotions or opinions so instant and 
true as in them; nowhere so pure from a selfish 
infusion. The constituency at home hearkens to 
their words, watches the color of their cheek, and 
therein, as in a glass, dresses its own. Our public 



94 ESSAY III. 

assemblies are pretty good tests of manly force. 
Our frank countrymen of the west and south have . 
a taste for character, and like to know whether the 
New Englander is a substantial man, or whether 
the hand can pass through him. 

The same motive force appears in trade. There 
are geniuses in trade, as well as in war, or the state, 
or letters ; and the reason why this or that man is 
fortunate, is not to be told. It lies in the man : 
that is all anybody can tell you about it. See 
him, and you will know as easily why he suc- 
ceeds, as, if you see Napoleon, you would compre- 
hend his fortune. In the new objects we recognize 
the old game, the habit of fronting the fact, and 
not dealing with it at second hand, through the 
perceptions of somebody else. Nature seems to 
authorize trade, as soon as you see the natural 
merchant, who appears not so much a private 
agent, as her factor and Minister of Commerce. 
His natural probity combines with his insight into 
the fabric of society, to put him above tricks, and 
he communicates to all his own faith, that con- 
tracts are of no private interpretation. The habit 
of his mind is a reference to standards of natural 
equity and public advantage ; and he inspires re- 
spect, and the wish to deal with him, both for the 
quiet spirit of honor which attends him, and for 
the intellectual pastime which the spectacle of so 



CHARACTER. 95 

much ability affords. This immensely stretched 
trade, which makes the capes of the Southern 
Ocean his wharves, and the Atlantic Sea his fa- 
miliar port, centres in his brain only ; and. nobody 
in the universe can make his place good. In his 
parlor, I see very well that he has been at hard 
work this morning, with that knitted brow, and 
that settled humor, which all his desire to be cour- 
teous cannot shake off. I see plainly how many 
firm acts have been done ; how many valiant noes 
have this day been spoken, when others would 
have uttered ruinous yeas. I see, with the pride 
of art, and skill of masterly arithmetic and power 
of remote combination, the consciousness of being 
an agent and playfellow of the original laws of 
the world. He too believes that none can supply 
him, and that a man must be born to trade, or he 
cannot learn it. 

This virtue draws the mind more, when it ap- 
pears in action to ends not so mixed. It works with 
most energy in the smallest companies and in pri- 
vate relations. In all cases, it is an extraordinary 
and incomputable agent. The excess of physical 
strength is paralyzed by it. Higher natures over- 
power lower ones by affecting them with a cer- 
tain sleep. The faculties are locked up, and offer 
no resistance. Perhaps that is the universal law. 
When the high cannot bring up the low to itself, 



96 



ESSAY III. 



it benumbs it, as man charms down the resistance 
of the lower animals. Men exert on each other a 
similar occult power. How often has the influ- 
ence of a true master realized all the tales of 
magic ! A river of command seemed to run down 
from his eyes into all those who beheld him, a tor- 
rent of strong sad light, like an Ohio or Danube, 
which pervaded them with his thoughts, and col- 
ored all events with the hue of his mind. " What 
means did you employ ? " was the question asked 
of the wife of Concini, in regard to her treatment 
of Mary of Medici ; and the answer was, " Only 
that influence which every strong mind has over a 
weak one." Cannot Caesar in irons shuffle off the 
irons, and transfer them to the person of Hippo or 
Thraso the turnkey ? Is an iron handcuff so im- 
mutable a bond? Suppose a slaver on the coast 
of Guinea should take on board a gang of negroes, 
which should contain persons of the stamp of 
Toussaint L'Ouverture : or, let us fancy, under 
these swarthy masks he has a gang of Washing- 
tons in chains. When they arrive at Cuba, will 
the relative order of the ship's company be the 
same ? Is there nothing but rope and iron ? Is 
there no love, no reverence ? Is there never a 
glimpse of right in a poor slave-captain's mind ; 
and cannot these be supposed available to break, 
or elude, or in any manner overmatch the tension 
of an inch or two of iron ring ? 



CHARACTER. 97 

This is a natural power, like light and heat, and 
all nature cooperates with it. The reason why we 
feel one man's presence, and do not feel another's, 
is as simple as gravity. Truth is the summit of 
being ; justice is the application of it to affairs. 
All individual natures stand in a scale, according to 
the purity of this element in them. The will of 
the pure runs down from them into other natures, 
as water runs down from a higher into a lower ves- 
sel. This natural force is no more to be withstood, 
than any other natural force. We can drive a 
stone upward for a moment into the air, but it is 
yet true that all stones will forever fall ; and what- 
ever instances can be quoted of unpunished theft, 
or of a lie which somebody credited, justice must 
prevail, and it is the privilege of truth to make 
itself believed. Character is this moral order seen 
through the medium of an individual nature. An 
individual is an encloser. Time and space, liberty 
and necessity, truth and thought, are left at large no 
longer. Now, the universe is a close or pound. 
All things exist in the man tinged with the man- 
ners of his soul. With what quality is in him, he 
infuses all nature that he can reach ; nor does he 
tend to lose himself in vastness, but, at how long 
a curve soever, all his regards return into his own 
good at last. He animates all he can, and he sees 
only what he animates. He encloses the world, 
9 



98 ESSAY III. 

as the patriot does his country, as a material basis 
for his character, and a theatre for action. A 
healthy soul stands united with the Just and the 
True, as the magnet arranges itself with the pole, 
so that he stands to all beholders like a transparent 
object betwixt them and the sun, and whoso jour- 
neys towards the sun, journeys towards that person. 
He is thus the medium of the highest influence to. 
all who are not on the same level. Thus, men of 
character are the conscience of the society to 
which they belong. 

The natural measure of this power is the resist- 
ance of circumstances. Impure men consider life 
as it is reflected in opinions, events, and persons. 
They cannot see the action, until it is done. Yet 
its moral element preexisted in the actor, and its 
quality as right or wrong, it was easy to predict. 
Everything in nature is bipolar, or has a positive 
and negative pole. There is a male and a female, a 
spirit and a fact, a north and a south. Spirit is the 
positive, the event is the negative. Will is the 
north, action the south pole. Character may be 
ranked as having its natural place in the north. It 
shares the magnetic currents of the system. The 
feeble souls are drawn to the south or negative pole. 
They look at the profit or hurt of the action. 
They never behold a principle until it is lodged in 
a person. They do not wish to be lovely, but to be 



CHARACTER. 99 

loved. Men of character like to hear of their 
faults: the other class do not like to hear of 
faults ; they worship events ; secure to them a fact, 
a connection, a certain chain of circumstances, and 
they will ask no more. The hero sees that the 
event is ancillary : it must follow him. A given 
order of events has no power to secure to him the 
satisfaction which the imagination attaches to 
it ; the soul of goodness escapes from any set of 
circumstances, whilst prosperity belongs to a cer- 
tain mind, and will introduce that power and vic- 
tory which is its natural fruit, into any order of 
events. No change of circumstances can repair a 
defect of character. We boast our emancipation 
from many superstitions; but if we have broken 
any idols, it is through a transfer of the idolatry. 
What have I gained, that I no longer immolate a 
bull to Jove, or to Neptune, or a mouse to Hecate ; 
that I do not tremble before the Eumenides, or the 
Catholic Purgatory, or the Calvinistic Judgment- 
day, — if I quake at opinion, the public opinion, as 
we call it ; or at the threat of assault, or contumely, 
or bad neighbors, or poverty, or mutilation, or at 
the rumor of revolution, or of murder ? If I quake, 
what matters it what I quake at ? Our proper vice 
takes form in one or another shape, according to the 
sex, age, or temperament of the person, and, if we 
are capable of fear, will readily find terrors. The 



100 ESSAY III. 

covetousness or the malignity which saddens me, 
when I ascribe it to society, is my own. I am 
always environed by myself. On the other part, 
rectitude is a perpetual victory, celebrated not by 
cries of joy, but by serenity, which is joy fixed or 
habitual. It is disgraceful to fly to events for con- 
firmation of our truth and worth. The capitalist 
does not run every hour to the broker, to coin his 
advantages into current money of the realm ; he is 
satisfied to read in the quotations of the market, 
that his stocks have risen. The same transport 
which the occurrence of the best events in the best 
order would occasion me, I must learn to taste 
purer in the perception that my position is every 
hour meliorated, and does already command those 
events I desire. That exultation is only to be 
checked by the foresight of an order of things so 
excellent, as to throw all our prosperities into the 
deepest shade. 

The face which character wears to me is self- 
sufficingness. I revere the person who is riches ; 
so that I cannot think of him as alone, or poor, or 
exiled, or unhappy, or a client, but as perpetual pa- 
tron, benefactor, and beatified man. Character is 
centrality, the impossibility of being displaced or 
overset. A man should give us a sense of mass. 
Society is frivolous, and shreds its day into scraps, 
its conversation into ceremonies and escapes. But 



CHARACTER. 101 

if I go to see an ingenious man, I shall think my- 
self poorl}' - entertained if he give me nimble pieces 
of benevolence and etiquette ; rather he shall stand 
stoutly in his place, and let me apprehend, if it 
were only his resistance ; know that I have encoun- 
tered a new and positive quality; — great refresh- 
ment for both of us. It is much, that he does not 
accept the conventional opinions and practices. 
That nonconformity will remain a goad and remem- 
brancer, and every inquirer will have to dispose of 
him, in the first place. There is nothing real or 
useful that is not a seat of war. Our houses ring 
with laughter, and personal and critical gossip, but 
it helps little. But the uncivil, unavailable man, 
who is a problem and a threat to society, whom it 
cannot let pass in silence, but must either worship 
or hate, — and to whom all parties feel related, both 
the leaders of opinion, and the obscure and eccen- 
tric, — he helps ; he puts America and Europe in 
the wrong, and destroys the skepticism which says, 
' man is a doll, let us eat and drink, 'tis the best 
we can do,' by illuminating the untried and un- 
known. Acquiescence in the establishment, and 
appeal to the public, indicate infirm faith, heads 
which are not clear, and which must see a house 
built, before they can comprehend the plan of it. 
The wise man not only leaves out of his thought 
the many, but leaves out the few. Fountains, the 
9* 



lUi ESSSAY III. 

self-moved, the absorbed, the commander because 
he is commanded, the assured, the primary, — they 
are good ; for these announce the instant presence 
of supreme power. 

Our action should rest mathematically on our 
substance. In nature, there are no false valuations. 
A pound of water in the ocean-tempest has no 
more gravity than in a midsummer pond. All 
things work exactly according to their quality, and 
according to their quantity ; attempt nothing they 
cannot do, except man only. He has pretension : 
he wishes and attempts things beyond his force. 
I read in a book of English memoirs, " Mr. Fox 
(afterwards Lord Holland) said, he must have the 
Treasury ; he had served up to it, and would have 
it." — Xenophon and his Ten Thousand were 
quite equal to what they attempted, and did it ; so 
equal, that it was not suspected to be a grand and 
inimitable exploit. Yet there stands that fact un- 
repealed, a high-water-mark in military history. 
Many have attempted it since, and not been equal 
to it. It is only on reality, that any power of 
action can be based. No institution will be better 
than the institutor. I knew an amiable and accom- 
plished person who undertook a practical reform, 
yet I was never able to find in him the enterprise 
of love he took in hand. He adopted it by ear 
and by the understanding from the books he had 



CHAKACTEH. 103 

been reading. All his action was tentative, a piece 
of the city carried out into the fields, and was the 
city still, and no new fact, and could not inspire 
enthusiasm. Had there been something latent, in 
the man, a terrible undemonstrated genius agitat- 
ing and embarrassing his demeanor, we had 
watched for its advent. It is not enough that the 
intellect should see the evils, and their remedy. 
We shall still postpone our existence, nor take the 
ground to which we are entitled, whilst it is only 
a thought, and not a spirit that incites us. We 
have not yet served up to it. 

These are properties of life, and another trait is 
the notice of incessant growth. Men should be 
intelligent and earnest. They must also make us 
feel, that they have a controlling happy future, 
opening before them, whose early twilights already 
kindle in the passing hour. The hero is miscon- 
ceived and misreported : he cannot therefore wait to 
unravel any man's blunders : he is again on his road, 
adding new powers and honors to his domain, and 
new claims on your heart, which will bankrupt 
you, if you have loitered about the old things, 
and have not kept your relation to him, by adding 
to your wealth. New actions are the only apol- 
ogies and explanations of old ones, which the noble 
can bear to offer or to receive. If your friend has 
displeased you, you shall not sit down to consider 



104 ESSAY III. 

it, for he has already lost all memory of the pas- 
sage, and has doubled his power to serve you, and, 
ere you can rise up again, will burden you with 
blessings. 

We have no pleasure in thinking of a benevo- 
lence that is only measured by its works. Love is 
inexhaustible, and if its estate is wasted, its gran- 
ary emptied, still cheers and enriches, and the man, 
though he sleep, seems to purify the air, and his 
house to adorn the landscape and strengthen the 
laws. People always recognize this difference. 
We know who is benevolent, by quite other 
means than the amount of subscription to soup- 
societies. It is only low merits that can be enu- 
merated. Fear, when your friends say to you what 
you have done well, and say it through ; but when 
they stand with uncertain timid looks of respect 
and half-dislike, and must suspend their judgment 
for years to come, you may begin to hope. Those 
who live to the future must always appear selfish 
to those who live to the present. Therefore it was 
droll in the good Riemer, who has written memoirs 
of Goethe, to make out a list of his donations and 
good deeds, as, so many hundred thalers given to 
Stilling, to Hegel, to Tischbein : a lucrative place 
found for Professor Voss, a post under the Grand 
Duke for Herder, a pension for Meyer, two profes- 
sors recommended to foreign universities, &c, &c. 



CHARACTER. 105 

The longest list of specifications of benefit, would 
look very short. A man is a poor creature, if he is 
to be measured so. For, all these, of course, are 
exceptions ; and the rule and hodiernal life of a 
good man is benefaction. The true charity of 
Goethe is to be inferred from the account he gave 
Dr. Eckermann, of the way in which he had spent 
his fortune. " Each bon-mot of mine has cost a 
purse of gold. Half a million of my own money, 
the fortune I inherited, my salary, and the large 
income derived from my writings for fifty years 
back, have been expended to instruct me in what 
I now know. I have besides seen," &c. 

I own it is but poor chat and gossip to go to 
enumerate traits of this simple and rapid power, 
and we are painting the lightning with charcoal ; 
but in these long nights and vacations, I like to 
console myself so. Nothing but itself can copy it. 
A word warm from the heart enriches me. I sur- 
render at discretion. How death-cold is literary 
genius before this fire of life ! These are the 
touches that reanimate my heavy soul, and give it 
eyes to pierce the dark of nature. I find, where 
I thought myself poor, there was I most rich. 
Thence comes a new intellectual exaltation, to be 
again rebuked by some new exhibition of charac- 
ter. Strange alternation of attraction and repul- 
sion ! Character repudiates intellect, yet excites 



106 ESSAY III. 

it ; and character passes into thought, is published 
so, and then is ashamed before new flashes of moral 
worth. 

Character is nature in the highest form. It is 
of no use to ape it, or to contend with it. Some- 
•what is possible of resistance, and of persistence, 
and of creation, to this power, which will foil all 
emulation. 

This masterpiece is best where no hands but 
nature's have been laid on it. Care is taken that 
the greatly-destined shall slip up into life in the 
shade, with no thousand-eyed Athens to watch 
and blazon every new thought, every blushing 
emotion of young genius. Two persons lately, — 
very young children of the most high God, — have 
given me occasion for thought. When I explored 
the source of their sanctity, and charm for the 
imagination, it seemed as if each answered, ' From 
my nonconformity : I never listened to your peo- 
ple's law, or to what they call their gospel, and 
wasted my time. I was content with the simple 
rural poverty of my own : hence this sweetness : 
my work never reminds you of that ; — is pure of 
that.' And nature advertises me in such persons, 
that, in democratic America, she will not be 
democratized. How cloistered and constitution- 
ally sequestered from the market and from scan- 
dal ! It was only this morning, that I sent away 



CHARACTER. 107 

some wild flowers of these wood-gods. They are 
a relief from literature, — these fresh draughts from 
the sources of thought and sentiment ; as we read, 
in an age of polish and criticism, the first lines of 
written prose and verse of a nation. How capti- 
vating is their devotion to their favorite books, 
whether iEschylus, Dante, Shakspeare, or Scott, 
as feeling that they have a stake in that book : 
who touches that, touches them ; — and especially 
the total solitude of the critic, the Patmos of thought 
from which he writes, in unconsciousness of any 
eyes that shall ever read this writing. Could they 
dream on still, as angels, and not wake to compar- 
isons, and to be flattered ! Yet some natures are 
too good to be spoiled by praise, and wherever the 
vein of thought reaches down into the profound, 
there is no danger from vanity. Solemn friends 
will warn them of the danger of the head's being 
turned by the flourish of trumpets, but they can 
afford to smile. I remember the indignation of an 
eloquent Methodist at the kind admonitions of a 
Doctor of Divinity, — ' My friend, a man can nei- 
ther be praised nor insulted.' But forgive the 
counsels ; they are very natural. I remember the 
thought which occurred to me when some ingen- 
ious and spiritual foreigners came to America, was. 
Have you been victimized in being brought hither? 
— or, prior to that, answer me this, ' Are you vic- 
timizate ? ' 



108 ESSAY III. 

As I have said, nature keeps these sovereignties 
in her own hands, and however pertly our sermons 
and disciplines would divide some share of credit, 
and teach that the laws fashion the citizen, she 
goes her own gait, and puts the wisest in the 
wrong. She makes very light of gospels and 
prophets, as one who has a great many more to pro- 
duce, and no excess of time to spare on any one. 
There is a class of men, individuals of which ap- 
pear at long intervals, so eminently endowed with 
insight and virtue, that they have been unanimous- 
ly saluted as divine, and who seem to be an accu- 
mulation of that power we consider. Divine persons 
are character born, or, to borrow a phrase from 
Napoleon, they are victory organized. They are 
usually received with ill-will, because they are new, 
and because they set a bound to the exaggeration 
that has been made of the personality of the last 
divine person. Nature never rhymes her children, 
nor makes two men alike. When we see a great 
man, we fancy a resemblance to some historical 
person, and predict the sequel of his character and 
fortune, a result which he is sure to disappoint. 
None will ever solve the problem of his character 
according to our prejudice, but only in his own 
high unprecedented way. Character wants room ; 
must not be crowded on by persons, nor be judged 
from glimpses got in the press of affairs or on few 



CHARACTER. 109 

occasions. It needs perspective, as a great building. 
It may not, probably does not, form relations rapid- 
ly ; and we should not require rash explanation, 
either on the popular ethics, or on our own, of its 
action. 

I look on Sculpture as history. I do not think 
the Apollo and the Jove impossible in flesh and 
blood. Every trait which the artist recorded in 
stone, he had seen in life, and better than his copy. 
We have seen many counterfeits, but we are born 
believers in great men. How easily we read in 
old books, when men were few, of the smallest 
action of the patriarchs. We require that a man 
should be so large and columnar in the landscape, 
that it should deserve to be recorded, that he arose, 
and girded up his loins, and departed to such a 
place. The most credible pictures are those of 
majestic men who prevailed at their entrance, and 
convinced the senses ; as happened to the eastern 
magian who was sent to test the merits of Zer- 
tusht or Zoroaster. When the Yunani sage arrived 
at Balkh, the Persians tell us, Gushtasp appointed 
a day on which the Mobeds of every country 
should assemble, and a golden chair was placed for 
the Yunani sage. Then the beloved of Yezdam, 
the prophet Zertusht, advanced into the midst of 
the assembly. The Yunani sage, on seeing that 
chief, said, " This form and this gait cannot lie, and 
10 



110 ESSAY III. 

nothing but truth can proceed from them." Plato 
said, it was impossible not to believe in the children 
of the gods, "though they should speak without 
probable or necessary arguments." I should think 
myself very unhappy in my associates, if I could 
not credit the best things in history. "John Brad- 
shaw," says Milton, "appears like a consul, from 
whom the fasces are not to depart with the year ; i 
so that not on the tribunal only, but throughout his 
life, you would regard him as sitting in judgment 
upon kings. " I find it more creditable, since it is 
anterior information, that one man should know 
heaven, as the Chinese say, than that so many men 
should know the world. " The virtuous prince 
confronts the gods, without any misgiving. He 
waits a hundred ages till a sage comes, and does 
not doubt. He who confronts the gods, without 
any misgiving, knows heaven ; he who waits a hun- 
dred ages until a sage comes, without doubting, 
knows men. Hence the virtuous prince moves, 
and for ages shows empire the way." But there is 
no need to seek remote examples. He is a dull 
observer whose experience has not taught him the 
reality and force of magic, as well as of chemistry. 
The coldest precisian cannot go abroad without 
encountering inexplicable influences. One man 
fastens an eye on him, and the graves of the mem- 
ory render up their dead ; the secrets that make 



CHARACTER. Ill 

him wretched either to keep or to betray, must be 
yielded ; — another, and he cannot speak, and the 
bones of his body seem to lose their cartilages ; the 
entrance of a friend adds grace, boldness, and elo- 
quence to him ; and there are persons, he cannot 
choose but remember, who gave H transcendent 
expansion to his thought, and kindled another life 
in his bosom. 

What is so excellent as strict relations of amity, 
when they spring from this deep root? The suf- 
ficient reply to the skeptic, who. doubts the power 
and the furniture of man, is in that possibility of 
joyful intercourse with persons, which makes the 
faith and practice of all reasonable men. I know 
nothing which life has to offer so satisfying as the 
profound good understanding, which can subsist, 
after much exchange of good offices, between two 
virtuous men, each of whom is sure of himself, and 
sure of his friend. It is a happiness which post- 
pones all other gratifications, and makes politics, 
and commerce, and churches, cheap. For, when 
men shall meet as they ought, each a benefactor, a 
shower of stars, clothed with thoughts, with deeds, 
with accomplishments, it should be the festival of 
nature which all things announce. Of such friend- 
ship, love in the sexes is the first symbol, as all 
other things are symbols of love. Those relations 
to the best men, which, at one time, we reckoned 



112 ESSAY III. 

the romances of youth, become, in the progress of 
the character, the most solid enjoyment. 

If it were possible to live in right relations with 
men ! — if we could abstain from asking anything 
of them, from asking their praise, or help, or pity, 
and content us with compelling them through the 
virtue of the eldest laws ! Could we not deal with 
a few persons, — with one person, — after the un- 
written statutes, and make an experiment of their 
efficacy ? Could we not pay our friend the com- 
pliment of truth, of- silence, of forbearing ? Need 
we be so eager to seek him ? If we are related, 
we shall meet. It was a tradition of the ancient 
world, that no metamorphosis could hide a god 
from a god ; and there is a Greek verse which 
runs, 

"The Gods are to each other not unknown." 

Friends also follow the laws of divine necessity; 
they gravitate to each other, and cannot other- 
wise : — 

When each the other shall avoid, 
Shall each by each be most enjoyed. 

Their relation is not made, but allowed. The 
gods must seat themselves without seneschal in 
our Olympus, and as they can instal themselves by 
seniority divine. Society is spoiled, if pains are 
taken, if the associates are brought a mile to meet. 



CHARACTER. 113 

And if it be not society, it is a mischievous, low, 
degrading jangle, though made up of the best. All 
the greatness of each is kept back, and every foible 
in painful activity, as if the Olympians should meet 
to exchange snuff-boxes. 

Life goes headlong. We chase some flying 
scheme, or we are hunted by some fear or com- 
mand behind us. But if suddenly we encounter a 
friend, we pause ; our heat and hurry look foolish 
enough ; now pause, now possession, is required, and 
the power to swell the moment from the resources 
of the heart. The moment is all, in all noble re- 
lations. 

A divine person is the prophecy of the mind ; a 
friend is the hope of the heart. Our beatitude 
waits for the fulfilment of these two in one. The 
ages are opening this moral force. All force is the 
shadow or symbol of that. Poetry is joyful and 
strong, as it draws its inspiration thence. Men 
write their names on the world, as they are filled 
with this. History has been mean ; our nations 
have been mobs ; we have never seen a man : that 
divine form we do not yet know, but only the 
dream and prophecy of such : we do not know the 
majestic manners which belong to him, which ap- 
pease and exalt the beholder. We shall one day 
see that the most private is the most public ener- 
gy, that quality atones for quantity, and grandeur 
10* 



114 ESSAY III. 

of character acts in the dark, and succors them 
who never saw it. What greatness has yet ap- 
peared, is beginnings and encouragements to us in 
this direction. The history of those gods and 
saints which the world has written, and then wor- 
shipped, are documents of character. The ages 
have exulted in the manners of a youth who owed 
nothing to fortune, and who was hanged at the 
Tyburn of his nation, who, by the pure quality of 
his nature, shed an epic splendor around the facts of 
his death, which has transfigured every particular 
into an universal symbol for the eyes of mankind. 
This great defeat is hitherto onr highest fact. But 
the mind requires a victory to the senses, a force of 
character which will convert judge, jury, soldier, 
and king ; which will rule animal and mineral 
virtues, and blend with the courses of sap, of riv- 
ers, of winds, of stars, and of moral agents. 

If we cannot attain at a bound to these gran- 
deurs, at least, let us do them homage. In society, 
high advantages are set down to the possessor, as 
disadvantages. It requires the more wariness in 
our private estimates. I do not forgive in my 
friends the failure to know a fine character, and to 
entertain it with thankful hospitality. When, at 
last, that which we have always longed for, is ar- 
rived, and shines on us with glad rays out of that 
far celestial land, then to be coarse, then to be crit- 



CHARACTER. 115 

ical, and treat such a visitant with the jabber and 
suspicion of the streets, argues a vulgarity that 
seems to shut the doors of heaven. This is con- 
fusion, this the right insanity, when the soul no 
longer knows its own, nor where its allegiance, its 
religion, are due. Is there any religion but this, to 
know, that, wherever in the wide desert of being, 
the holy sentiment we cherish has opened into a 
flower, it blooms for me ? if none sees it, I see it ; 
1 am aware, if I alone, of the greatness of the fact. 
Whilst it blooms, I will keep sabbath or holy time, 
and suspend my gloom, and my folly and jokes. 
Nature is indulged by the presence of this guest. 
There are many eyes that can detect and honor the 
prudent and household virtues ; there are many 
that can discern Genius on his starry track, though 
the mob is incapable ; but when that love which 
is all-suffering, all-abstaining, all-aspiring, which 
has vowed to itself, that it will be a wretch and 
also a fool in this world, sooner than soil its white 
hands by any compliances, comes into our streets 
and houses, — only the pure and aspiring can know 
its face, and the only compliment they can pay it, 
is to own it. 



MANNERS. 



« How near to good is what is fair ! 
Which we no sooner sec, 
But with the lines and outward air 
Our senses taken be. 

Again yourselves compose, 
And now put all the aptness on 
Of Figure, that Proportion 

Or Color can disclose ; 
That if those silent arts were lost, 
Design and Picture, they might boast 

From you a newer ground, 
Instructed by the heightening sense 
Of dignity and reverence 

In their true motions found." 

Ben Jonsox. 



ESSAY IY. 
MANNERS. 



Half the world, it is said, knows not how the 
other half live. Our Exploring Expedition saw the 
Feejee islanders getting their dinner off human 
bones ; and they are said to eat their own wives 
and children. The husbandry of the modern in- 
habitants of Gournou (west of old Thebes) is philo- 
sophical to a fault. To set up their housekeeping, 
nothing is requisite but two or three earthen pots, a 
stone to grind meal, and a mat which is the bed. 
The house, namely, a tomb, is ready without rent 
or taxes. No rain can pass through the roof, and 
there is no door, for there is no want of one, as 
there is nothing to lose. If the house do not please 
them, they walk out and enter another, as there are 
several hundreds at their command. " It is some- 
what singular," adds Belzoni, to whom we owe this 
account, " to talk of happiness among people who 
live i:i sepulchres, among the corpses and rags of an 



120 ESSAY IV. 

ancient nation which they know nothing of." In 
the deserts of Borgoo, the rock-Tibboos still dwell 
in caves, like cliff-swallows, and the language of 
these negroes is compared by their neighbors to the 
shrieking of bats, and to the whistling of birds. 
Again, the Bornoos have no proper names ; indi- 
viduals are called after their height, thickness, or 
other accidental quality, and have nicknames 
merely. But the salt, the dates, the ivory, and the 
gold, for which these horrible regions are visited, 
find their way into countries, where the purchaser 
and consumer can hardly be ranked in one race 
with these cannibals and man-stealers ; countries 
where man serves himself with metals, wood, stone, 
glass, gum, cotton, silk, and wool ; honors himself 
with architecture ; writes laws, and contrives to 
execute his will through the hands of many na- 
tions ; and, especially, establishes a select society, 
running through all the countries of intelligent 
men, a self-constituted aristocracy, or fraternity of 
the best, which, without written law or exact usage 
of any kind, perpetuates itself, colonizes every new- 
planted island, and adopts and makes its own what- 
ever personal beauty or extraordinary native endow- 
ment any where appears. 

What fact more conspicuous in modern history, 
than the creation of the gentleman ? Chivalry is 
that, and loyalty is that, and, in English literature, 



MANNERS. 121 

half the drama, and all the novels, from Sir Philip 
Sidney to Sir Walter Scott, paint this figure. The 
word gentleman, which, like the word Christian, 
must hereafter characterize the present and the few 
preceding centuries, by the importance attached to 
it, is a homage to personal and incommunicable 
properties. Frivolous and fantastic additions have 
got associated with the name, but the steady inter- 
est of mankind in it must be attributed to the valu- 
able properties which it designates. An element 
which unites all the most forcible persons of every 
country ; makes them intelligible and agreeable to 
each other, and is somewhat so precise, that it is at 
once felt if an individual lack the masonic sign, 
cannot be any casual product, but must be an 
average result of the character and faculties univer- 
sally found in men. It seems a certain permanent 
average ; as the atmosphere is a permanent compo- 
sition, whilst so many gases are combined only to be 
decompounded. Comme ilfaut, is the Frenchman's 
description of good society, as we must be. It is a 
spontaneous fruit of talents and feelings of precisely 
that class who have most vigor, who take the lead 
in the world of this hour, and, though far from pure, 
far from constituting the gladdest and highest tone 
of human feeling, is as good as the whole society 
permits it to be. It is made of the spirit, more than 
of the talent of men, and is a compound result, into 
11 



122 ESSAY IV. 

which every great force enters as an ingredient, 
namely, virtue, wit, beauty, wealth, and power. 

There is something equivocal in all the words in 
use to express the excellence of manners and social 
cultivation, because the quantities are fluxional, and 
the last effect is assumed by the senses as the cause. 
The word gentleman has not any correlative ab- 
stract to express the quality. Gentility is mean, 
and gentilesse is obsolete. But we must keep alive 
in the vernacular, the distinction between fashion, 
a word of narrow and often sinister meaning, and 
the heroic character which the gentleman imports. 
The usual words, however, must be respected : they 
will be found to contain the root of the matter. 
The point of distinction in all this class of names, 
as courtesy, chivalry, fashion, and the like, is, that 
the flower and fruit, not the grain of the tree, are 
contemplated. It is beauty which is the aim this 
time, and not worth. The result is now in ques- 
tion, although our words intimate well enough the 
popular feeling, that the appearance supposes a sub- 
stance. The gentleman is a man of truth, lord of 
his own actions, and expressing that lordship in his 
behavior, not in any manner dependent and ser- 
vile either on persons, or opinions, or possessions. 
Beyond this fact of truth and real force, the word 
denotes good-nature or benevolence : manhood first, 
and then gentleness. The popular notion certainly 



MANNERS. 123 

adds a condition of ease and fortune ; but that is a 
natural result, of personal force and love, that they 
should possess and dispense the goods of the world. 
In times of violence, every eminent person must 
fall in with many opportunities to approve his stout- 
ness and worth ; therefore every man's name that 
emerged at all from the mass in the feudal ages, 
rattles in our ear like a flourish of trumpets. But 
personal force never goes out of fashion. That is 
still paramount to-day, and, in the moving crowd of 
good society, the men of valor and reality are 
known, and rise to their natural place. The com- 
petition is transferred from war to politics and 
trade, but the personal force appears readily enough 
in these new arenas. 

Power first, or no leading class. In politics and 
in trade, bruisers and pirates are of better promise 
than talkers and clerks. God knows that all sorts 
of gentlemen knock at the door ; but whenever 
used in strictness, and with any emphasis, the 
name will be found to point at original energy. It 
describes a man standing in his own right, and 
working after untaught methods. In a good lord, 
there must first be a good animal, at least to the 
extent of yielding the incomparable advantage of 
animal spirits. The ruling class must have more, 
but they must have these, giving in every company 
the sense of power, which makes things easy to be 



124 ESSAY IV. 

done which daunt the wise. The society of the 
energetic class, in their friendly and festive meet- 
ings, is full of courage, and of attempts, which in- 
timidate the pale scholar. The courage which 
girls exhibit is like a battle of Lundy's Lane, or a 
sea-fight. The intellect relies on memory to make 
some supplies to face these extemporaneous squad- 
rons. But memory is a base mendicant with 
basket and badge, in the presence of these sudden 
masters. The rulers of society must be up to the 
work of the world, and equal to their versatile 
office : men of the right Cassarian pattern, who 
have great range of affinity. I am far from be- 
lieving the timid maxim of Lord Falkland, ("that 
for ceremony there must go two to it ; since a bold 
fellow will go through the cunningest forms,") and 
am of opinion that the gentleman is the bold fel- 
low whose forms are not to be broken through ; 
and only that plenteous nature is rightful master, 
which is the complement of whatever person it con- 
verses with. My gentleman gives the law where 
he is ; he will outpray saints in chapel, outgeneral 
veterans in the field, and outshine all courtesy in the 
hall. He is good company for pirates, and good with 
academicians ; so that it is useless to fortify your- 
self against him ; he has the private entrance to all 
minds, and I could as easily exclude myself, as him. 
The famous gentlemen of Asia and Europe have 



MANNERS. 



125 



been of this strong type : Saladin, Sapor, the Cicl, 
Julius Cassar, Scipio, Alexander, Pericles, and the 
lordliest personages. They sat very carelessly in 
their chairs, and were too excellent themselves, to 
value any condition at a high rate. 

A plentiful fortune is reckoned necessary, in the 
popular judgment, to the completion of this man of 
the world : and it is a material deputy which walks 
through the dance which the first has led. Money 
is not essential, but this wide affinity is, which 
transcends the habits of clique and caste, and 
makes itself felt by men of all classes. If the aris- 
tocrat is only valid in fashionable circles, and not 
with truckmen, he will never be a leader in fash- 
ion ; and if the man of the people cannot speak on 
equal terms with the gentleman, so that the gentle- 
man shall perceive that he is already really of his 
own order, he is not to be feared. Diogenes, Soc- 
rates, and Epaminondas, are gentlemen of the best 
blood, who have chosen the condition of poverty, 
when that of wealth was equally open to them. 
I use these old names, but the men I speak of 
are my contemporaries. Fortune will not supply 
to every generation one of these well-appointed 
knights, but every collection of men furnishes 
some example of the class : and the politics of this 
country, and the trade of every town, are controlled 
by these hardy and irresponsible doers, who have 
11* 



126 ESSAY IV. 

invention to take the lead, and a broad sympathy 
which puts them in fellowship with crowds, and 
makes their action popular. 

The manners of this class are observed and 
caught with devotion by men of taste. The asso- 
ciation of these masters with each other, and with 
men intelligent of their merits, is mutually agreea- 
ble and stimulating. The good forms, the happi- 
est expressions of each, are repeated and adopted. 
By swift consent, everything superfluous is dropped, 
everything graceful is renewed. Fine manners 
show themselves formidable to the uncultivated 
man. They are a subtler science of defence to 
parry and intimidate ; but once matched by the 
skill of the other party, they drop the point of the 
sword, — points and fences disappear, and the youth 
finds himself in a more transparent atmosphere, 
wherein life is a less troublesome game, and not a 
misunderstanding rises between the players. Man- 
ners aim to facilitate life, to get rid of impediments, 
and bring the man pure to energize. They aid 
our dealing and conversation, as a railway aids 
travelling, by getting rid of all avoidable obstruc- 
tions of the road, and leaving nothing to be con- 
quered but pure space. These forms very soon be- 
come fixed, and a fine sense of propriety is cultivat- 
ed with the more heed, that it becomes a badge of 
social and civil distinctions. Thus grows up Fash- 



MANNERS. 127 

ion, an equivocal semblance, the most puissant, the 
most fantastic and frivolous, the most feared and 
followed, and which morals and violence assault in 
vain. 

There exists a strict relation between the class 
of power, and the exclusive and polished circles. 
The last are always filled or filling from the first. 
The strong men usually give some allowance even 
to the petulances of fashion, for that affinity they 
find in it. Napoleon, child of the revolution, de- 
stroyer of the old noblesse, never ceased to court 
the Faubourg St. Germain : doubtless with the feel- 
ing, that fashion is a homage to men of his stamp. 
Fashion, though in a strange way, represents all 
manly virtue. It is virtue gone to seed : it is a 
kind of posthumous honor. It does not often ca- 
ress the great, but the children of the great : it is a 
hall of the Past. It usually sets its face against 
the great of this hour. Great men are not com- 
monly in its halls : they are absent in the field : 
they are working, not triumphing. Fashion is 
made up of their children ; of those, who, through 
the value and virtue of somebody, have acquired 
lustre to their name, marks of distinction, means of 
cultivation and generosity, and, in their physical 
organization, a certain health and excellence, which 
secures to them, if not the highest power to work, 
yet high power to enjoy. The class of power, the 



128 ESSAY IV. 

working heroes, the Cortez, the Nelson, the Napo- 
leon, see that this is the festivity and permanent 
celebration of such as they ; that fashion is funded 
talent ; is Mexico, Marengo, and Trafalgar beaten 
out thin ; that the brilliant names of fashion run 
back to just such busy names as their own, fifty or 
sixty years ago. They are the sowers, their sons 
shall be the reapers, and their sons, in the ordinary 
course of things, must yield the possession of the 
harvest to new competitors with keener eyes and 
stronger frames. The city is recruited from the 
country. In the year 1805, it is said, every legiti- 
mate monarch in Europe was imbecile. The city 
would have died out, rotted, and exploded, long ago, 
but that it was reinforced from the fields. It is 
only country which came to town day before yes- 
terday, that is city and court to-day. 

Aristocracy and fashion are certain inevitable re- 
sults. These mutual selections are indestructible. 
If they provoke anger in the least favored class, 
and the excluded majority revenge themselves on 
the excluding minority, by the strong hand, and 
kill them, at once a new class finds itself at the top, 
as certainly as cream rises in a bowl of milk: and 
if the people should destroy class after class, until 
two men only were left, one of these would be the 
leader, and would be involuntarily served and cop- 
ied by the other. You may keep this minority 



MANNEKS. 129 

out of sight and out of mind, but it is tenacious 
of life, and is one of the estates of the realm. I 
am the more struck with this tenacity, when I see 
its work. It respects the administration of such 
•unimportant matters, that we should not look for 
any durability in its rule. We sometimes meet 
men under some strong moral influence, as, a patri- 
otic, a literary, a religious movement, and feel that 
the moral sentiment rules man and nature. We 
think all other distinctions and ties will be slight 
and fugitive, this of caste or fashion, for example ; 
yet come from year to year, and see how perma- 
nent that is, in this Boston or New York life of 
man, where, too, it has not the least countenance 
from the law of the land. Not in Egypt or in In- 
dia a firmer or more impassable line. Here are as- 
sociations whose ties go over, and under, and 
through it, a meeting of merchants, a military 
corps, a college class, a fire-club, a professional as- 
sociation, a political, a religious convention ; — the 
persons seem to draw inseparably near ; yet, that 
assembly once dispersed, its members will not in 
the year meet again. Each returns to his degree 
in the scale of good society, porcelain remains por- 
celain, and earthen earthen. The objects of fash- 
ion may be frivolous, or fashion may be objectless, 
but the nature of this union and selection can be 
neither frivolous nor accidental. Each man's rank 



130 ESSAY IV. 

in that perfect graduation depends on some symme- 
try in his structure, or some agreement in his struc- 
ture to the symmetry of society. Its doors unbar 
instantaneously to a natural claim of their own kind. 
A natural gentleman finds his way in, and will keep 
the oldest patrician out, who has lost his intrinsic 
rank. Fashion understands itself; good-breeding 
and personal superiority of whatever country read- 
ily fraternize with those of every other. The 
chiefs of savage tribes have distinguished them- 
selves in London and Paris, by the purity of their 
tournure. 

To say what good of fashion we can, — it rests 
on reality, and hates nothing so much as pretend- 
ers ; — to exclude and mystify pretenders, and send 
them into everlasting ' Coventry,' is its delight. 
We contemn, in turn, every other gift of men of 
the world ; but the habit even in little and the least 
matters, of not appealing to any but our own sense 
of propriety, constitutes the foundation of all chiv- 
alry. There is almost no kind of self-reliance, so 
it be sane and proportioned, which fashion does not 
occasionally adopt, and give it the freedom of its 
saloons. A sainted soul is always elegant, and, if 
it will, passes unchallenged into the most guarded 
ring. But so will Jock the teamster pass, in some 
crisis that brings him thither, and find favor, as 
long as his head is not giddy with the new circum- 



MANNERS. 131 

stance, and the iron shoes do not wish to dance in 
waltzes and cotillons. For there is nothing settled 
in manners, but the laws of behavior yield to the 
energy of the individual. The maiden at her first 
ball, the countryman at a city dinner, believes that 
there is a ritual according to which every act and 
compliment must be performed, or the failing party 
must be cast out of this presence. Later, they 
learn that good sense and character make their 
own forms every moment, and speak or abstain, 
take wine or refuse it, stay or go, sit in a chair or 
sprawl with children on the floor, or stand on their 
head / or what else soever, in a new and aboriginal 
way : and that strong will is always in fashion, let 
who will be unfashionable. All that fashion demands 
is composure, and self-content. A circle of men 
perfectly well-bred would be a company of sensible 
persons, in which every man's native manners and 
character appeared. If the fashionist have not this 
quality, he is nothing. We are such lovers of self- 
reliance, that we excuse in a man many sins, if he 
will show us a complete satisfaction in his position, 
which asks no leave to be, of mine, or any man's 
good opinion. But any deference to some eminent 
man or woman of the world, forfeits all privilege 
of nobility. He is an underling: I have nothing 
to do with him ; I will speak with his master. A 
man should not go where he cannot carry his 



132 ESSAY IV. 

whole sphere or society with him, — not bodily, 
the whole circle of his friends, but atmospherically. 
He should preserve in a new company the same 
attitude of mind and reality of relation, which his 
daily associates draw him to, else he is shorn of 
his best beams, and will be an orphan in the mer- 
riest club. " If you could see Vich Ian Vohr with 

his tail on! " But Vich Ian Vohr must always 

carry his belongings in some fashion, if not added 
as honor, then severed as disgrace. 

There will always be in society certain persons 
who are mercuries of its approbation, and whose 
glance will at any time determine for the curious 
their standing in the world. These are the cham- 
berlains of the lesser gods. Accept their coldness 
as an omen of grace with the loftier deities, and 
allow them all their privilege. They are clear in 
their office, nor could they be thus formidable, 
without their own merits. But do not measure 
the importance of this class by their pretension, or 
imagine that a fop can be the dispenser of honor 
and shame. They pass also at their just rate ; for 
how can they otherwise, in circles which exist as 
a sort of herald's office for the sifting of character ? 

As the first thing man requires of man, is reality, 
so, that appears in all the forms of society. We 
pointedly, and by name, introduce the parties to 
each other. Know you before all heaven and 



MANNERS. 133 

earth, that this is Andrew, and this is Gregory ; — 
they look each other in the eye ; they grasp each 
other's hand, to identify and signalize each other. 
It is a great satisfaction. A gentleman never 
dodges : his eyes look straight forward, and he 
assures the other party, first of all, that he has 
been met. For what is it that we seek, in so 
many visits and hospitalities? Is it your draperies, 
pictures, and decorations? Or, do we not insatiably 
ask, Was a man in the house ? I may easily go 
into a great household where there is much sub- 
stance, excellent provision for comfort, luxury, and 
taste, and yet not encounter there any Amphitryon, 
who shall subordinate these appendages. I may 
go into a cottage, and find a farmer who feels 
that he is the man I have come to see, and fronts 
me accordingly. It was therefore a very natural 
point of old feudal etiquette, that a gentleman 
who received a visit, though it were of his sov- 
ereign, should not leave his roof, but should wait 
his arrival at the door of his house. No house, 
though it were the Tuileries, or the Escurial, 
is good for any thing without a master. And yet 
we are not often gratified by this hospitality. 
Every body we know surrounds himself with a 
fine house, fine books, conservatory, gardens, equi- 
page, and all manner of toys, as screens to inter- 
pose between himself and his guest. Does it not 
12 



134 ESSAY IV. 

seem as if man was of a very sly, elusive nature, 
and dreaded nothing so much as a full rencontre 
front to front with his fellow? It were unmerciful, 
I know, quite to abolish the use of these screens, 
which are of eminent convenience, whether the 
guest is too great, or too little. We call together 
many friends who keep each other in play, or, by 
luxuries and ornaments we amuse the young peo- 
ple, and guard our retirement. Or if, perchance, a 
searching realist comes to our gate, before whose 
eye we have no care to stand, then again we run 
to our curtain, and hide ourselves as Adam at the 
voice of the Lord God in the garden. Cardinal 
Caprara, the Pope's legate at Paris, defended him- 
self from the glances of Napoleon, by an immense 
pair of green spectacles. Napoleon remarked them, 
and speedily managed to rally them off: and yet 
Napoleon, in his turn, was not great enough, with 
eight hundred thousand troops at his back, to face 
a pair of freeborn eyes, but fenced himself with eti- 
quette, and within triple barriers of reserve : and, 
as all the world knows from Madame de Stael, was 
wont, when he found himself observed, to dis- 
charge his face of all expression. But emperors 
and rich men are by no means the most skilful 
masters of good manners. No rentroll nor army- 
list can dignify skulking and dissimulation : and 
the first point of courtesy must always be truth, as 



MANNERS. 135 

really all the forms of good breeding point that 
way. 

I have jnst been reading, in Mr. Hazlitt's transla- 
tion, Montaigne's account of his journey into Italy, 
and am struck with nothing more agreeably than 
the self-respecting fashions of the time. His arrival 
in each place, the arrival of a gentleman of France, 
is an event of some consequence. Wherever he 
goes, he pays a visit to whatever prince or gentle- 
man of note resides upon his road, as a duty to him- 
self and to civilization. When he leaves any house 
in which he has lodged for a few weeks, he causes 
his arms to be painted and hung up as a perpetual 
sign to the house, as was the custom of gentlemen. 

The complement of this graceful self-respect, and 
that of all the points of good breeding I most re- 
quire and insist upon, is deference. I like that every 
chair should be a throne, and hold a king. I prefer 
a tendency to stateliness, to an excess of fellowship. 
Let the incommunicable objects of nature and the 
metaphysical isolation of man teach us independ- 
ence. Let us not be too much acquainted. I 
would have a man enter his house through a hall 
filled with heroic and sacred sculptures, that he 
might not want the hint of tranquillity and self- 
poise. We should meet each morning, as from 
foreign countries, and spending the day together, 
should depart at night, as into foreign countries. 



136 ESSAY IV. 

In all things I would have the island of a man in- 
violate. Let us sit apart as the gods, talking from 
peak to peak all round Olympus. No degree of 
affection need invade this religion. This is myrrh 
and rosemary to keep the other sweet. Lovers 
should guard their strangeness. If they forgive too 
much, all slides into confusion and meanness. It is 
easy to push this deference to a Chinese etiquette ; 
but coolness and absence of heat and haste indicate 
fine qualities. A gentleman makes no noise : a 
lady is serene. Proportionate is our disgust at those 
invaders who fill a studious house with blast and 
running, to secure some paltry convenience. Not 
less I dislike a low sympathy of each with his neigh- 
bor's needs. Must we have a good understanding 
with one another's palates ? as foolish people who 
have lived long together, know when each wants 
salt or sugar. I pray my companion, if he wishes 
for bread, to ask me for bread, and if he wishes for 
sassafras or arsenic, to ask me for them, and not to 
hold out his plate, as if I knew already. Every 
natural function can be dignified by deliberation 
and privacy. Let us leave hurry to slaves. The 
compliments and ceremonies of our breeding should 
recall, however remotely, the grandeur of our des- 
tiny. 

The flower of courtesy does not very well bide 
handling, but if we dare to open another leaf, and 



MANNERS. 137 

explore what parts go to its conformation, we shall 
find also an intellectual quality. To the leaders of 
men, the brain as well as the flesh and the heart 
must furnish a proportion. Defect in manners is 
usually the defect of fine perceptions. Men are too 
coarsely made for the delicacy of beautiful carriage 
and customs. It is not quite sufficient to good- 
breeding, a union of kindness and independence. 
We imperatively require a perception of, and a 
homage to beauty in our companions. Other vir- 
tues are in request in the field and workyard, but a 
certain degree of taste is not to be spared in those 
we sit with. I could better eat with one who did 
not respect the truth or the laws, than with a sloven 
and unpresentable person. Moral qualities rule the 
world, but at short distances, the senses are despotic. 
The same discrimination of fit and fair runs out, if 
with less rigor, into all parts of life. The average 
spirit of the energetic class is good sense, acting 
under certain limitations and to certain ends. It 
entertains every natural gift. Social in its nature, 
it respects every thing which tends to unite men. 
It delights in measure. The love of beauty is 
mainly the love of measure or proportion. The 
person who screams, or uses the superlative degree, 
or converses with heat, puts whole drawing-rooms 
to flight. If you wish to be loved, love measure. 
You must have genius, or a prodigious usefulness, 
12* 



138 ESSAY IV. 

if you will hide the want of measure. This per- 
ception comes in to polish and perfect the parts of 
the social instrument. Society will pardon much 
to genius and special gifts, but, being in its nature 
a convention, it loves what is conventional, or 
what belongs to coming together. That makes 
the good and bad of manners, namely, what helps 
or hinders fellowship. For, fashion is not good 
sense absolute, but relative ; not good sense private, 
but good sense entertaining company. It hates 
corners and sharp points of character, hates quar- 
relsome, egotistical, solitary, and gloomy people ; 
hates whatever can interfere with total blending of 
parties; whilst it values all peculiarities as in the 
highest degree refreshing, which can consist with 
good felloAvship. And besides the general infusion 
of wit to heighten civility, the direct splendor of 
intellectual power is ever welcome in fine society 
as the costliest addition to its rule and its credit. 

The dry light must shine in to adorn our festival, 
but it must be tempered and shaded, or that will 
also offend. Accuracy is essential to beauty, and 
quick perceptions to politeness, but not too quick 
perceptions. One may be too punctual and too 
precise. He must leave the omniscience of busi- 
ness at the door, when he comes into the palace of 
beauty. Society loves Creole natures, and sleepy, 
languishing manners, so that they cover sense, grace, 



MANNERS. 139 

and good-will : the air of drowsy strength, which 
disarms criticism ; perhaps, because such a person 
seems to reserve himself for the best of the game, 
and not spend himself on surfaces ; an ignoring eye, 
which does not see the annoyances, shifts, and in- 
conveniences, that cloud the brow and smother the 
voice of the sensitive. 

Therefore, besides personal force and so much 
perception as constitutes unerring taste, society de- 
mands in its patrician class, another element already 
intimated, which it significantly terms good-nature, 
expressing all degrees of generosity, from the low- 
est willingness and faculty to oblige, up to the 
heights of magnanimity and love. Insight we 
must have, or we shall run against one another, and 
miss the way to our food ; but intellect is selfish 
and barren. The secret of success in society, is a 
certain heartiness and sympathy. A man who is 
not happy in the company, cannot find any word 
in his memory that will fit the occasion. All his 
information is a little impertinent. A man who is 
happy there, finds in every turn of the conversation 
equally lucky occasions for the introduction of that 
which he has to say. The favorites of society, and 
what it calls whole souls, are able men, and of more 
spirit than wit, who have no uncomfortable egotism, 
but who exactly fill the hour and the company, 
contented and contenting, at a marriage or a fune- 



140 ESSAY IV. 

ral, a ball or a jury, a water-party or a shooting- 
match. England, which is rich in gentlemen, fur- 
nished, in the beginning of the present century, a 
good model of that genius which the world loves, 
in Mr. Fox, who added to his great abilities the 
most social disposition, and real love of men. Par- 
liamentary history has few better passages than the 
debate, in which Burke and Fox separated in the 
House of Commons ; when Fox urged on his old 
friend the claims of old friendship with such ten- 
derness' that the house was moved to tears. Another 
anecdote is so close to my matter, that I must haz- 
ard the story. A tradesman who had long dunned 
him for a note of three hundred guineas, found him 
one day counting gold, and demanded payment : 
"No," said Fox, " I owe this money to Sheridan : 
it is a debt of honor : if an accident should happen 
to me, he has nothing to show." " Then," said 
the creditor, " I change my debt into a debt of 
honor," and tore the note in pieces. Fox thanked 
the man for his confidence, and paid him, saying, 
"his debt was of older standing, and Sheridan 
must wait." Lover of liberty, friend of the Hin- 
doo, friend of the African slave, he possessed a great 
personal popularity ; and Napoleon said of him on 
the occasion of his visit to Paris, in 1S05, " Mr. 
Fox will always hold the first place in an assembly 
at the Tuileries." 



MANNERS. 141 

We may easily seem ridiculous in our eulogy of 
courtesy, whenever we insist on benevolence as its 
foundation. The painted phantasm Fashion rises 
to cast a species of derision on what we say. But 
I will neither be driven from some allowance to 
Fashion as a symbolic institution, nor from the be- 
lief that love is the basis of courtesy. We must 
obtain that, if we can ; but by all means we must 
affirm this. Life owes much of its spirit to these 
sharp contrasts. Fashion which affects to be honor, 
is often, in all men's experience, only a ballroom- 
code. Yet, so long as it is the highest circle, in the 
imagination of the best heads on the planet, there 
is- something necessary and excellent in it ; for it is 
not to be supposed that men have agreed to be the 
dupes of anything preposterous ; and the respect 
which these mysteries inspire in the most rude and 
sylvan characters, and the curiosity with which 
details of high life are read, betray the universality 
of the love of cultivated manners. I know that a 
comic disparity would be felt, if we should enter 
the acknowledged 'first circles,' and apply these 
terrific standards of justice, beauty, and benefit, to 
the individuals actually found there. Monarchs and 
heroes, sages and lovers, these gallants are not. 
Fashion has many classes and many rules of pro- 
bation and admission ; and not the best alone. 
There is not only the right of conquest, which 



142 ESSAY IV. 

genius pretends, — the individual, demonstrating 
his natural aristocracy best of the best ; — but less 
claims will pass for the time ; for Fashion loves 
lions, and points, like Circe, to her horned company. 
This gentleman is this afternoon arrived from Den- 
mark ; and that is my Lord Ride, who came yester- 
day from Bagdat ; here is Captain Friese, from Cape 
Turnagain : and Captain Symmes, from the interior 
of the earth ; and Monsieur Jovaire, who came 
down this morning in a balloon ; Mr. Hobnail, the 
reformer ; and Reverend Jul Bat, who has converted 
the whole torrid zone in his Sunday school ; and 
Signor Torre del Greco, who extinguished Vesuvius 
by pouring into it the Bay of Naples ; Spahi, the 
Persian ambassador ; and Tul Wil Shan, the exiled 
nabob of Nepaul, whose saddle is the new moon. 
— But these are monsters of one day, and to-morrow 
will be dismissed to their holes and dens ; for, in 
these rooms, every chair is waited for. The artist, 
the scholar, and, in general, the clerisy, wins its 
way up into these places, and gets represented here, 
somewhat on this footing of conquest. Another 
mode is to pass through all the degrees, spending a 
year and a day in St. Michael's Square, being 
steeped in Cologne water, and perfumed, and dined, 
and introduced, and properly grounded in all the 
biography, and politics, and anecdotes of the bou- 
doirs. 



MANNERS. 143 

Yet these fineries may have grace and wit. Let 
there be grotesque sculpture about the gates and 
offices of temples. Let the creed and command- 
ments even have the saucy homage of parody. The 
forms of politeness universally express benevolence 
in superlative degrees. What if they are in the 
mouths of selfish men, and used as means of self- 
ishness ? What if the false gentleman almost 
bows the true out of the world ? What if the false 
gentleman contrives so to address his companion, 
as civilly to exclude all others from his discourse, 
and also to make them feel excluded ? Real ser- 
vice will not lose its nobleness. All generosity is 
not merely French and sentimental ; nor is it to be 
concealed, that living blood and a passion of kind- 
ness does at last distinguish God's gentleman from 
Fashion's. The epitaph of Sir Jenkin Grout is not 
wholly unintelligible to the present age. " Here 
lies Sir Jenkin Grout, who loved his friend, and 
persuaded his enemy : what his mouth ate, his 
hand paid for: what his servants robbed, he re- 
stored : if a woman gave him pleasure, he sup- 
ported her in pain : he never forgot his children : 
and whoso touched his finger, drew after it his 
whole body." Even the line of heroes is not ut- 
terly extinct. There is still ever some admirable 
person in plain clothes, standing on the wharf, who 
jumps in to rescue a drowning man ; there is still 



144 ESSAY IV. 

some absurd inventor of charities ; some guide and 
comforter of runaway slaves ; some friend of Po- 
land ; some Philhellene ; some fanatic who plants 
shade-trees for the second and third generation, and 
orchards when he is grown old ; some well-con- 
cealed piety : some just man happy in an ill-fame ; 
some youth ashamed of the favors of fortune, and 
impatiently casting them on other shoulders. And 
these are the centres of society, on which it returns 
for fresh impulses. These are the creators of 
Fashion, which is an attempt to organize beauty 
of behavior. The beautiful and the generous are, 
in the theory, the doctors and apostles of this 
church : Scipio, and the Cid, and Sir Philip Sid- 
ney, and Washington, and every pure and valiant 
heart, who worshipped Beauty by word and by 
deed. The persons who constitute the natural 
aristocracy, are not found in the actual aristocracy, 
or, only on its edge ; as the chemical energy of 
the spectrum is found to be greatest just outside of 
the spectrum. Yet that is the infirmity of the senes- 
chals, who do not know their sovereign, when he 
appears. The theory of society supposes the exist- 
ence and sovereignty of these. It divines afar off 
their coming. It says with the elder gods, — 

" As Heaven and Earth are fairer far 
Than Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chiefs ; 
And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth, 
In form and shape compact and beautiful ; 



MANNERS. 145 

So, on our heels a fresh perfection treads ; 
A power, more strong in beauty, born of us, 
And fated to excel us, as we pass 
In glory that old Darkness : 

for, 'tis the eternal law, 

That first in beauty shall be first in might." 

Therefore, within the ethnical circle of good 
society, there is a narrower and higher circle, con- 
centration of its light, and flower of courtesy, to 
which there is always a tacit appeal of pride and 
reference, as to its inner and imperial court, the 
parliament of love and chivalry. And this is con- 
stituted of those persons in whom heroic disposi- 
tions are native, with the love of beauty, the 
delight in society, and the power to embellish the 
passing day. If the individuals who compose the 
purest circles of aristocracy in Europe, the guarded 
blood of centuries, should pass in review, in such 
manner as that we could, at leisure, and critically 
inspect their behavior, we might find no gentleman, 
and no lady : for, although excellent specimens of 
courtesy and high-breeding would gratify us in 
the assemblage, in the particulars, we should detect 
offence. Because, elegance comes of no breeding, 
but of birth. There must be romance of charac- 
ter, or the most fastidious exclusion of impertinen- 
cies will not avail. It must be genius which takes 
that direction : it must be not courteous, but courtesy. 
High behavior is as rare in fiction, as it is in fact. 
13 



146 ESSAY IV. 

Scott is praised for the fidelity with which he 
painted the demeanor and conversation of the 
superior classes. Certainly, kings and queens, 
nobles and great ladies, had some right to complain 
of the absurdity that had been put in their mouths, 
before the days of Waverley ; but neither does 
Scott's dialogue bear criticism. His lords brave 
each other in smart epigrammatic speeches, but the 
dialogue is in costume, and does not please on the 
second reading : it is not warm with life. In Shak- 
speare alone, the speakers do not strut and bridle, 
the dialogue is easily great, and he adds to so many 
titles that of being the best-bred man in England, 
and in Christendom. Once or twice in a lifetime 
we are permitted to enjoy the charm of noble man- 
ners, in the presence of a man or woman who have 
no bar in their nature, but whose character emanates 
freely in their word and gesture. A beautiful form 
is better than a beautiful face ; a beautiful behavior 
is better than a beautiful form : it gives a higher 
pleasure than statues or pictures ; it is the finest of 
the fine arts. A man is but a little thing in the 
midst of the objects of nature, yet, by the moral 
quality radiating from his countenance, he may 
abolish all considerations of magnitude, and in his 
manners equal the majesty of the world. I have 
seen an individual, whose manners, though wholly 
within the conventions of elegant society, were 



MANNERS. 147 

never learned there, but were original and com- 
manding, and held out protection and prosperity ; 
one who did not need the aid of a court-suit, but 
carried the holiday in his eye ; who exhilarated the 
fancy by flinging wide the doors of new modes of 
existence ; who shook off the captivity of etiquette, 
with happy, spirited bearing, good-natured and free 
as Robin Hood ; yet with the port of an emperor, — 
if need be, calm, serious, and fit to stand the gaze 
of millions. 

The open air and the fields, the street and pub- 
lic chambers, are the places where Man executes 
his will ; let him yield or divide the sceptre at the 
door of the house. Woman, with her instinct of 
behavior, instantly detects in man a love of trifles, 
any coldness or imbecility, or, in short, any want of 
that large, flowing, and magnanimous deportment, 
which is indispensable as an exterior in the hall. 
Our American institutions have been friendly to her, 
and at this moment, I esteem it a chief felicity of 
this country, that it excels in women. A certain 
awkward consciousness of inferiority in the men, 
may give rise to the new chivalry in behalf of 
Woman's Rights. Certainly, let her be as much 
better placed in the laws and in social forms, as the 
most zealous reformer can ask, but I confide so en- 
tirely in her inspiring and musical nature, that I 
believe only herself can show us how she shall be 



148 ESSAY IV. 

served. The wonderful generosity of her senti- 
ments raises her at times into heroical and godlike 
regions, and verifies the pictures of Minerva, Juno, 
or Polymnia ; and, by the firmness with which she 
treads her upward path, she convinces the coarsest 
calculators that another road exists, than that 
which their feet know. But besides those who 
make good in our imagination the place of muses 
and of Delphic Sibyls, are there not women who 
fill our vase with wine and roses to the brim, so 
that the wine runs over and fills the house with 
perfume; who inspire us with courtesy; who un- 
loose our tongues, and we speak ; who anoint our 
eyes, and we see ? We say things we never 
thought to have said; for once, our walls of habit- 
ual reserve vanished, and left us at large ; we were 
children playing with children in a wide field of 
flowers. Steep us, we cried, in these influences, 
for days, for weeks, and we shall be sunny poets, 
and will write out in many-colored words the 
romance that you are. Was it Hafiz or Firdousi, 
that said of his Persian Lilla, She was an elemental 
force, and astonished me by her amount of life, 
when I saw her day after day radiating, every 
instant, redundant joy and grace on all around her. 
She was a solvent powerful to reconcile all hetero- 
geneous persons into one society : like air or water, 
an element of such a great range of affinities, that 



MANNERS. 149 

it combines readily with a thousand substances. 
Where she is present, all others will be more than 
they are wont. She was a unit and whole, so 
that whatsoever she did, became her. She had too 
much sympathy and desire to please, than that you 
could say, her manners were marked with dignity, 
yet no princess could surpass her clear and erect 
demeanor on each occasion. She did not study 
the Persian grammar, nor the books of the seven 
poets, but all the poems of the seven seemed to be 
written upon her. For, though the bias of her 
nature was not to thought, but to sympathy, yet 
was she so perfect in her own nature, as to meet 
intellectual persons by the fulness of her heart, 
warming them by her sentiments ; believing, as she 
did, that by dealing nobly with all, all would show 
themselves noble. 

I know that this Byzantine pile of chivalry or 
Fashion, which seems so fair and picturesque to 
those who look at the contemporary facts for science 
or for entertainment, is not equally pleasant to all 
spectators. The constitution of our society makes 
it a giant's castle to the ambitious youth who have 
not found their names enrolled in its Golden Book, 
and whom it has excluded from its coveted honors 
and privileges. They have yet to learn that its 
seeming grandeur is shadowy and relative : it is 
13* 



150 ESSAY IV. 

great by their allowance : its proudest gates will 
fly open at the approach of their courage and virtue. 
For the present distress, however, of those who 
are predisposed to suffer from the tyrannies of this 
caprice, there are easy remedies. To remove your 
residence a couple of miles, or at most four, will 
commonly relieve the most extreme susceptibility. 
For, the advantages which fashion values, are plants 
which thrive in very confined localities, in a few 
streets^ namely. Oat of this precinct, they go for 
nothing ; are of no use in the farm, in the forest, 
in the market, in war, in the nuptial society, in 
the literary or scientific circle, at sea, in friendship, 
in the heaven of thought or virtue. 

But we have lingered long enough in these 
painted courts. The worth of the thing signified 
must vindicate our taste for the emblem. Every- 
thing that is called fashion and courtesy humbles 
itself before the cause and fountain of honor, crea- 
tor of titles and dignities, namely, the heart of 
love. This is the royal blood, this the fire, which, 
in all countries and contingencies, will work after 
its kind, and conquer and expand all that approaches 
it. This gives new meanings to every fact. This 
impoverishes the rich, suffering no grandeur but its 
own. What is rich? Are you rich enough to 
help anybody ? to succor the unfashionable and 
the eccentric ? rich enough to make the Canadian 



MANNERS. 151 

in his wagon, the itinerant with his consul's paper 
which commends him " To the charitable," the 
swarthy Italian with his few broken words of 
English, the lame pauper hunted by overseers from 
town to town, even the poor insane or besotted 
wreck of man or woman, feel the noble exception 
of your presence and your house, from the general 
bleakness and stoniness; to make such feel that 
they were greeted with a voice which made them 
both remember and hope ? What is vulgar, but to 
refuse the claim on acute and conclusive reasons ? 
What is gentle, but to allow it, and give their heart 
and yours one holiday from the national caution ? 
Without the rich heart, wealth is an ugly beggar. 
The king of Schiraz could not afford to be so 
bountiful as the poor Osman who dwelt at his "gate. 
Osman had a humanity so broad and deep, that 
although his speech was so bold and free with the 
Koran, as to disgust all the dervishes, yet was there 
never a poor outcast, eccentric, or insane man, some 
fool who had cut off his beard, or who had been 
mutilated under a vow, or had a pet madness in his 
brain, but fled at once to him, — that great heart lay 
there so sunny and hospitable in the centre of the 
country, — that it seemed as if the instinct of all 
sufferers drew them to his side. And the madness 
which he harbored, he did not share. Is not this 
to be rich ? this only to be rightly rich ? 



152 ESSAY IV. 

But I shall hear without pain, that I play the 
courtier very ill, and talk of that which I do not 
well understand. It is easy to see, that what is 
called by distinction society and fashion, has good 
laws as well as bad, has much that is necessary, 
and much that is absurd. Too good for banning, 
and too bad for blessing, it reminds us of a tra- 
dition of the pagan mythology, in any attempt to 
settle its character. ' I overheard Jove, one day,' 
said Silenus, ' talking of destroying the earth ; he 
said, it had failed ; they were all rogues and vixens, 
who went from bad to worse, as fast as the days 
succeeded each other. Minerva said, she hoped not ; 
they were only ridiculous little creatures, with this 
odd circumstance, that they had a blur, or in- 
determinate aspect, seen far or seen near ; if you 
called them bad, they would appear so ; if you 
called them good, they would appear so ; and there 
was no one person or action among them, which 
would not puzzle her owl, much more all Olympus, 
to know whether it was fundamentally bad or 
good.' 



GIFTS. 



Gifts of one who loved me, — 
'Twas high time they came ; 
When he ceased to love me, 
Time they stopped for shaine. 



ESSAY V. 
GIFTS. 



It is said that the world is in a state of bank- 
ruptcy, that the world owes the world more than 
the world can pay, and ought to go into chancery, 
and be sold. I do not think this general insolvency, 
which involves in some sort all the population, 
to be the reason of the difficulty experienced at 
Christmas and New Year, and other times, in be- 
stowing gifts ; since it is always so pleasant to be 
generous, though very vexatious to pay debts. 
But the impediment lies in the choosing. If, at 
any time, it comes into my head, that a present is 
due from me to somebody, I am puzzled what to 
give, until the opportunity is gone. Flowers and 
fruits are always fit presents ; flowers, because they 
are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty out- 
values all the utilities of the world. These gay 
natures contrast with the somewhat stern coun- 
tenance of ordinary nature : they are like music 



156 ESSAY V. 

heard out of a workhouse. Nature does not cocker 
us : we are children, not pets : she is not fond : 
everything is dealt to us without fear or favor, after 
severe universal laws. Yet these delicate flowers 
look like the frolic and interference of love and 
beauty. Men use to tell us that we love flattery, 
even though we are not deceived by it, because it 
shows that we are of importance enough to be 
courted. Something like that pleasure, the flowers 
give us : what am I to whom these sweet hints 
are addressed ? Fruits are acceptable gifts, because 
they are the flower of commodities, and admit of 
fantastic values being attached to them. If a man 
should send to me to come a hundred miles to visit 
him, and should set before me a basket of fine sum- 
mer-fruit, I should think there was some proportion 
between the labor and the reward. 

For common gifts, necessity makes pertinences 
and beauty every day, and one is glad when an 
imperative leaves him no option, since if the man 
at the door have no shoes, you have not to con- 
sider whether you could procure him a paint-box. 
And as it is always pleasing to see a man eat bread, 
or drink water, in the house or out of doors, so it 
is always a great satisfaction to supply these first 
wants. Necessity does everything well. In our 
condition of universal dependence, it seems heroic 
to let the petitioner be the judge of his necessity, 



GIFTS. 157 

and to give all that is asked, though at great incon- 
venience. If it be a fantastic desire, it is better to 
leave to others the office of punishing him. I can 
think of many parts I should prefer playing to that 
of the Furies. Next to things of necessity, the 
rule for a gift, which one of my friends prescribed, 
is, that we might convey to some person that which 
properly belonged to his character, and was easily 
associated with him in thought. But our tokens 
of compliment and love are for the most part bar- 
barous. Rings and other jewels are not gifts, but 
apologies for gifts. The only gift is a portion of 
thyself. Thou must bleed for me. Therefore the 
poet brings his poem ; the shepherd, his lamb ; the 
farmer, corn ; the miner, a gem ; the sailor, coral 
and shells ; the painter, his picture ; the girl, a hand- 
kerchief of her own sewing. This is right and 
pleasing, for it restores society in so far to the pri- 
mary basis, when a man's biography is conveyed 
in his gift, and every man's wealth is an index of 
his merit. But it is a cold, lifeless business when 
you go to the shops to buy me something, which 
does not represent your life and talent, but a gold- 
smith's. This is fit for kings, and rich men who 
represent kings, and a false state of property, to 
make presents of gold and silver stuffs, as a kind 
of symbolical sin-offering, or payment of black- 
mail. 

14 



158 ESSAY V. 

The law of benefits is a difficult channel, which 
requires careful sailing, or rude boats. It is not 
the office of a man to receive gifts. How dare 
you give them ? We wish to be self-sustained. 
We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that 
feeds us is in some danger of being bitten. We 
can receive anything from love, for that is a way of 
receiving it from ourselves ; but not from any one 
who assumes to bestow. We sometimes hate the 
meat which we eat, because there seems something 
of degrading dependence in living by it. 

" Brother, if Jove to thee a present make, 
Take heed that from his hands thou nothing take." 

We ask the whole. Nothing less will content us. 
We arraign society, if it do not give us besides 
earth, and fire, and water, opportunity, love, rever- 
ence, and objects of veneration. 

He is a good man, who can receive a gift well. 
We are either glad or sorry at a gift, and both emo- 
tions are unbecoming. Some violence, I think, is 
done, some degradation borne, when I rejoice or 
grieve at a gift. I am sorry when my independence 
is invaded, or when a gift comes from such as do 
not know my spirit, and so the act is not supported ; 
and if the gift pleases me overmuch, then I should 
be ashamed that the donor should read my heart, 
and see that I love his commodity, and not him. 



GIFTS. 159 

The gift, to be true, must be the flowing of the 
giver unto me, correspondent to my flowing unto 
him. When the waters are at level, then my 
goods pass to him, and his to me. All his are mine, 
all mine his. I say to him, How can you give me 
this pot of oil, or this flagon of wine, when all 
your oil and wine is mine, which belief of mine 
this gift seems to deny ? Hence the fitness of 
beautiful, not useful things for gifts. This giving 
is flat usurpation, and therefore when the bene- 
ficiary is ungrateful, as all beneficiaries hate all 
Timons, not at all considering the value of the 
gift, but looking back to the greater store it was 
taken from. I rather sympathize with the bene- 
ficiary, than with the anger of my lord Timon. 
For, the expectation of gratitude is mean, and is 
continually punished by the total insensibility of 
the obliged person. It is a great happiness to get 
off" without injury and heart-burning, from one who 
has had the ill luck to be served by you. It is a 
very onerous business, this of being served, and 
the debtor naturally wishes to give you a slap. A 
golden text for these gentlemen is' that which I so 
admire in the Buddhist, who never thanks, and 
who says, " Do not flatter your benefactors." 

The reason of these discords I conceive to be, 
that there is no commensurability between a man 
and any gift. You cannot give anything to a mag- 



160 ESSAY V. 

nanimous person. After you have served him, he 
at once puts you in debt by his magnanimity. 
The service a man renders his friend is trivial and 
selfish, compared with the service he knows his 
friend stood in readiness to yield him, alike before 
he had begun to serve his friend, and now also. 
Compared with that good will I bear my friend, the 
benefit it is in my power to render him seems small. 
Besides, our action on each other, good as well as 
evil, is so incidental and at random, that we can sel- 
dom hear the acknowledgments of any person who 
would thank us for a benefit, without some shame 
and humiliation. We can rarely strike a direct 
stroke, but must be content with an oblique one ; 
we seldom have the satisfaction of yielding a direct 
benefit, which is directly received. But rectitude 
scatters favors on every side without knowing it, 
and receives with wonder the thanks of all people. 
I fear to breathe any treason against the majesty 
of love, which is the genius and god of gifts, and 
to whom we must not affect to prescribe. Let 
him give kingdoms or flower-leaves indifferently. 
There are persons, from whom we always expect 
fairy-tokens ; let us not cease to expect them. This 
is prerogative, and not to be limited by our muni- 
cipal rules. For the rest, I like to see that we cannot 
be bought and sold. The best of hospitality and 
of generosity is also not in the will, but in fate. 



GIFTS. 10 1 

I find that I am not much to you ; you do not need 
me ; you do not feel me ; then am I thrust out of 
doors, though you proffer me house and lands. No 
services are of any value, but only likeness. When 
I have attempted to join myself to others by ser- 
vices, it proved an intellectual trick, — no more. 
They eat your service like apples, and leave you 
out. But love them, and they feel you, and de- 
light in you all the time. 
14* 



NATURE. 



The rounded world is fair to see, 

Nine times folded in mystery : 

Though baffled seers cannot impart 

The secret of its laboring heart, 

Throb thine with Nature's throbbing breast, 

And all is clear from east to west. 

Spirit that lurks each form within 

Beckons to spirit of its kin ; 

Self-kindled every atom glows, 

And hints the future which it owes. 



ESSAY VI. 
NATURE. 



There are days which occur in this climate, at 
almost any season of the year, wherein the world 
reaches its perfection, when the air, the heavenly 
bodies, and the earth, make a harmony, as if nature 
would indulge her offspring; when, in these bleak 
upper sides of the planet, nothing is to desire that 
we have heard of the happiest latitudes, and we 
bask in the shining hours of Florida and Cuba ; 
when everything that has life gives sign of satisfac- 
tion, and the cattle that lie on the ground seem to 
have great and tranquil thoughts. These halcyons 
may be looked for with a little more assurance in 
that pure October weather, which we distinguish by 
the name of the Indian summer. The day, im- 
measurably long, sleeps over the broad hills and 
warm wide fields. To have lived through all its 
sunny hours, seems longevity enough. The solitary 
places do not seem quite lonely. At the gates of 



166 ESSAY VI. 

the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced 
to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise 
and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off his 
back with the first step he makes into these pre- 
cincts. Here is sanctity which shames our reli- 
gions, and reality which discredits our heroes. 
Here we find nature to be the circumstance which 
dwarfs every other circumstance, and judges like a 
god all men that come to her. We have crept out 
of our close and crowded houses into the night and 
morning, and we see what majestic beauties daily 
wrap us in their bosom. How willingly we would 
escape the barriers which render them comparative- 
ly impotent, escape the sophistication and second 
thought, and suffer nature to intrance us. The 
tempered light of the woods is like a perpetual morn- 
ing, and is stimulating and heroic. The anciently 
reported spells of these places creep on us. The 
stems of pines, hemlocks, and oaks, almost gleam 
like iron on the excited eye. The incommunicable 
trees begin to persuade us to live with them, and 
quit our life of solemn trifles. Here no history, or 
church, or. state, is interpolated on the divine sky 
and the immortal year. How easily we might walk 
onward into the opening landscape, absorbed by 
new pictures, and by thoughts fast succeeding each 
other, until by degrees the recollection of home 
was crowded out of the mind, all memory oblit- 



NATURE. 167 

erated by the tyranny of the present, and we were 
led in triumph by nature. 

These enchantments are medicinal, they sober 
and heal us. These are plain pleasures, kindly and 
native to us. We come to our own, and make 
friends with matter, which the ambitious chatter 
of the schools would persuade us to despise. We 
never can part with it ; the mind loves its old home : 
as water to our thirst, so is the rock, the ground, to 
our eyes, and hands, and feet. It is firm water : it 
is cold flame : what health, what affinity ! Ever 
an old friend, ever like a dear friend and brother, 
when we chat affectedly with strangers, comes in 
this honest face, and takes a grave liberty with us, 
and shames us out of our nonsense. Cities give 
not the human senses room enough. We go out 
daily and nightly to feed the eyes on the horizon, 
and require so much scope, just as we need water 
for our bath. There are all degrees of natural in- 
fluence, from these quarantine powers of nature, 
up to her dearest and gravest ministrations to the 
imagination and the soul. There is the bucket of 
cold water from the spring, the wood-fire to which 
the chilled traveller rushes for safety, — and there 
is the sublime moral of autumn and of noon. We 
nestle in nature, and draw our living as parasites 
from her roots and grains, and we receive glances 
from the heavenly bodies, which call us to solitude, 



168 ESSAY VI. 

and foretell the remotest future. The blue zenith 
is the point in which romance and reality meet. I 
think, if we should be rapt away into all that we 
dream of heaven, and should converse with Gabriel 
and Uriel, the upper sky would be all that would 
remain of our furniture. 

It seems as if the day was not wholly profane, in 
which we have given heed to some natural object. 
The fall of snowflakes in a still air, preserving to 
each crystal its perfect form ; the blowing of sleet 
over a wide sheet of water, and over plains; the 
waving ryefield ; the mimic waving of acres of 
houstonia, whose innumerable florets whiten and 
ripple before the eye ; the reflections of trees and 
flowers in glassy lakes ; the musical steaming odor- 
ous south wind, which converts all trees to wind- 
harps ; the crackling and spurting of hemlock in 
the flames ; or of pine logs, which yield glory to 
the walls and faces in the sittingroom, — these are 
the music and pictures of the most ancient religion. 
My house stands in low land, with limited outlook, 
and on the skirt of the village. But I go with my 
friend to the shore of our little river, and with one 
stroke of the paddle, I leave the village politics and 
personalities, yes, and the world of villages and per- 
sonalities behind, and pass into a delicate realm of 
sunset and moonlight, too bright almost for spotted 
man to enter without novitiate and probation. We 



NATURE. 169 

penetrate bodily this incredible beauty : we dip our 
hands in this painted element : our eyes are bathed 
in these lights and forms. A holiday, a villeg- 
giatura, a royal revel, the proudest, most heart- 
rejoicing festival that valor and beauty, power and 
taste, ever decked and enjoyed, establishes itself on 
the instant. These sunset clouds, these delicately 
emerging stars, with their private and ineffable 
glances, signify it and proffer it. I am taught the 
poorness of our invention, the ugliness of towns 
and palaces. Art and luxury have early learned 
that they must work as enhancement and sequel to 
this original beauty. I am overinstructed for my 
return. Henceforth I shall be hard to please. I 
cannot go back to toys. I am grown expensive 
and sophisticated. I can no longer live without 
elegance : but a countryman shall be my master of 
revels. He who knows the most, he who knows 
what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the 
waters, the plants, the heavens, and how to come 
at these enchantments, is the rich and royal man, 
Only as far as the masters of the world have called 
in nature to their aid, can they reach the height of 
magnificence. This is the meaning of their hang- 
ing-gardens, villas, garden-houses, islands, parks, 
and preserves, to back their faulty personality with 
these strong accessories. I do not wonder that the 
landed interest should be invincible in the state 



170 ESSAY VI. 

with these dangerous auxiliaries. These bribe and 
invite ; not kings, not palaces, not men, not women, 
but these tender and poetic stars, eloquent of secret 
promises. We heard what the rich man said, we 
knew of his villa, his grove, his wine, and his com- 
pany, but the provocation and point of the invita- 
tion came out of these beguiling stars. In their 
soft glances, I see what men strove to realize in 
some Versailles, or Paphos, or Ctesiphon. Indeed, 
it is the magical lights of the horizon, and the blue 
sky for the background, which save all our works 
of art, which were otherwise bawbles. When the 
rich tax the poor with servility and obsequiousness, 
they should consider the effect of men reputed to 
be the possessors of nature, on imaginative minds. 
Ah ! if the rich were rich as the poor fancy riches ! 
A boy hears a military band play on the field at 
night, and he has kings and queens, and famous 
chivalry palpably before him. He hears the echoes 
of a horn in a hill country, in the Notch Mountains, 
for example, which converts the mountains into an 
iEolian harp, and this supernatural tiralira restores 
to him the Dorian mythology, Apollo, Diana, and 
all divine hunters and huntresses. Can a musical 
note be so lofty, so haughtily beautiful ! To the 
poor young poet, thus fabulous is his picture of 
society ; he is loyal ; he respects the rich ; they are 
rich for the sake of his imagination ; how poor his 



NATURE. 171 

fancy would be, if they were not rich ! That they 
have some high-fenced grove, which they call a 
park ; that they live in larger and better-garnished 
saloons than he has visited, and go in coaches, keep- 
ing only the society of the elegant, to watering- 
places, and to distant cities, are the groundwork 
from which he has delineated estates of romance, 
compared with which their actual possessions are 
shanties and paddocks. The muse herself betrays 
her son, and enhances the gifts of wealth and well- 
born beauty, by a radiation out of the air, and 
clouds, and forests that skirt the road, — a certain 
haughty favor, as if from patrician genii to patri- 
cians, a kind of aristocracy in nature, a prince of 
the power of the air. 

The moral sensibility which makes Edens and 
Tempes so easily, may not be always found, but 
the material landscape is never far off. We can 
find these enchantments without visiting the Como 
Lake, or the Madeira Islands. We exaggerate the 
praises of local scenery. In every landscape, the 
point of astonishment is the meeting of the sky and 
the earth, and that is seen from the first hillock as 
well as from the top of the Alleghanies. The stars 
at night stoop down over the brownest, homeliest 
common, with all the spiritual magnificence which 
they shed on the Campagna, or on the marble 
desarts of Egypt. The uprolled clouds and the 



172 ESSAY VI. 

colors of morning and evening, will transfigure 
maples and alders. The difference between land- 
scape and landscape is small, but there is great 
difference in the beholders. There is nothing so 
wonderful in any particular landscape, as the neces- 
sity of being beautiful under which every landscape 
lies. Nature cannot be surprised in undress. Beau- 
ty breaks in everywhere. 

But it is very easy to outrun the sympathy of 
readers on this topic, which schoolmen called natu- 
re/, naturata, or nature passive. One can hardly 
speak directly of it without excess. It is as easy 
to broach in mixed companies what is called "the 
subject of religion." A susceptible person does not 
like to indulge his tastes in this kind, without the 
apology of some trivial necessity : he goes to see a 
wood-lot, or to look at the crops, or to fetch a plant 
or a mineral from a remote locality, or he carries 
a fowling-piece, or a fishing-rod. I suppose this 
shame must have a good reason. A dilettantism in 
nature is barren and unworthy. The fop of fields 
is no better than his brother of Broadway. Men 
are naturally hunters and inquisitive of wood-craft, 
and I suppose that such a gazetteer as wood-cutters 
and Indians should furnish facts for, would take 
place in the most sumptuous drawing-rooms of all 
the "Wreaths" and "Flora's chaplets" of the 
bookshops ; yet ordinarily, whether we are too 



NATURE. 173 

clumsy for so subtle a topic, or from whatever 
cause, as soon as men begin to write on nature, 
they fall into euphuism. Frivolity is a most unfit 
tribute to Pan, who ought to be represented in the 
mythology as the most continent of gods. I would 
not be frivolous before the admirable reserve and 
prudence of time, yet I cannot renounce the right 
of returning often to this old topic. The multitude 
of false churches accredits the true religion. Litera- 
ture, poetry, science, are the homage of man to this 
unfathomed secret, concerning which no sane man 
can affect an indifference or incuriosity. Nature is 
loved by what is best in us. It is loved as the city 
of God, although, or rather because there is no citi- 
zen. The sunset is unlike anything that is under- 
neath it : it wants men. And the beauty of nature 
must always seem unreal and mocking, until the 
landscape has human figures, that are as good as 
itself. If there were good men, there would never 
be this rapture in nature. If the king is in the 
palace, nobody looks at the walls. It is when he 
is gone, and the house is filled with grooms and 
gazers, that we turn from the people, to find relief 
in the majestic men that are suggested by the pic- 
tures and the architecture. The critics who com- 
plain of the sickly separation of the beauty of 
nature from the thing to be done, must consider 
that our hunting of the picturesque is inseparable 



174 ESSAY VI. 

from our protest against false society. Man is 
fallen ; nature is erect, and serves as a differential 
thermometer, detecting the presence or absence of 
the divine sentiment in man. By fault of our dul- 
ness and selfishness, we are looking up to nature, 
but when we are convalescent, nature will look 
up to us. We see the foaming brook with com- 
punction : if our own life flowed with the right 
energy, we should shame the brook. The stream 
of zeal sparkles with real fire, and not with reflex 
rays of sun and moon. Nature may be as selfishly 
studied as trade. Astronomy to the selfish becomes 
astrology; psychology, mesmerism (with intent to 
show where our spoons are gone); and anato- 
my and physiology become phrenology and pal- 
mistry. 

But taking timely warning, and leaving many 
things unsaid on this topic, let us not longer omit 
our homage to the Efficient Nature, natura natu- 
rans, the quick cause, before which all forms flee 
as the driven snows, itself secret, its works driven 
before it in flocks and multitudes, (as the ancients 
represented nature by Proteus, a shepherd,) and in 
undescribable variety. It publishes itself in crea- 
tures, reaching from particles and spicula, through 
transformation on transformation to the highest 
symmetries, arriving at consummate results without 
a shock or a leap. A little heat, that is, a little 



NATURE. 175 

motion, is all that differences the bald, dazzling 
white, and deadly cold poles of the earth from the 
prolific tropical climates. All changes pass without 
violence, by reason of the two cardinal conditions 
of boundless space and boundless time. Geology 
has initiated us into the secularity of nature, and 
taught us to disuse our dame-school measures, and 
exchange our Mosaic and Ptolemaic schemes for 
her large style. We knew nothing rightly, for 
want of perspective. Now we learn what patient 
periods must round themselves before the rock is 
formed, then before the rock is broken, and the 
first lichen race has disintegrated the thinnest ex- 
ternal plate into soil, and opened the door for the 
remote Flora, Fauna, Ceres, and Pomona, to come 
in. How far off yet is the trilobite ! how far the 
quadruped ! how inconceivably remote is man ! 
All duly arrive, and then race after race of men. It 
is a long way from granite to the oyster ; farther 
yet to Plato, and the preaching of the immortality 
of the soul. Yet all must come, as surely as the 
first atom has two sides. 

Motion or change, and identity or rest, are the 
first and second secrets of nature : Motion and 
Rest. The whole code ot her laws may be written 
on the thumbnail, or the signet of a ring. The 
whirling bubble on the surface of a brook, admits 
us to the secret of the mechanics of the sky. Every 



176 



ESSAY VI. 



shell on the beach is a key to it. A little water 
made to rotate in a cup explains the formation of 
the simpler shells ; the addition of matter from 
year to year, arrives at last at the most complex 
forms ; and yet so poor is nature with all her craft, 
that, from the beginning to the end of the universe, 
she has but one stuff, — but one stuff with its two 
ends, to serve up all her dream-like variety. Com- 
pound it how she will, star, sand, fire, water, tree, 
man, it is still one stuff, and betrays the same prop- 
erties. 

Nature is always consistent, though she feigns 
to contravene her own laws. She keeps her 
laws, and seems to transcend them. She arms and 
equips an animal to find its place and living in the 
earth, and, at the same time, she arms and equips 
another animal to destroy it. Space exists to divide 
creatures ; but by clothing the sides of a bird with 
a few feathers, she gives him a petty omnipresence. 
The direction is forever onward, but the artist still 
goes back for materials, and begins again Avith the 
first elements on the most advanced stage : other- 
wise, all goes to ruin. If we look at her work, we 
seem to catch a glance of a system in transition. 
Plants are the young of the world, vessels of health 
and vigor; but they grope ever upward tpwards 
consciousness ; the trees are imperfect men, and 
seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the 



NATURE. 177 

ground. The animal is the novice and probationer 
of a more advanced order. The men, though 
young, having tasted the first drop from the cup of 
thought, are already dissipated : the maples and 
ferns are still uncorrupt ; yet no doubt, when they 
come to consciousness, they too will curse and 
swear. Flowers so strictly belong to youth, that 
we adult men soon come to feel, that their beauti- 
ful generations concern not us : we have had our 
day ; now let the children have theirs. The flow- 
ers jilt us, and we are old bachelors with our ridic- 
ulous tenderness. 

Things are so strictly related, that according 
to the skill of the eye, from any one object the 
parts and properties of any other may be predicted. 
If we had eyes to see it, a bit of stone from the 
city wall would certify us of the necessity that 
man must exist, as readily as the city. That iden- 
tity makes us all one, and reduces to nothing great 
intervals on our customary scale. We talk of devia- 
tions from natural life, as if artificial life were not 
also natural. The smoothest curled courtier in the 
boudoirs of a palace has an animal nature, rude and 
aboriginal as a white bear, omnipotent to its own 
ends, and is directly related, there amid essences 
and billetsdoux, to Himmaleh mountain-chains, and 
the axis of the globe. If we consider how much 
we are nature's, we need not be superstitious about 



178 ESSAY VI. 

towns, as if that terrific or benefic force did not 
find us there also, and fashion cities. Nature, who 
made the mason, made the house. We may easily 
hear too much of rural influences. The cool dis- 
engaged air of natural objects, makes them enviable 
to us, chafed and irritable creatures with red faces, 
and we think we shall be as grand as they, if we 
camp out and eat roots ; but let us be men instead 
of woodchucks, and the oak and the elm shall 
gladly serve us, though we sit in chairs of ivory on 
carpets of silk. 

This guiding identity runs through all the sur- 
prises and contrasts of the piece, and characterizes 
every law. Man carries the world in his head, the 
whole astronomy and chemistry suspended in a 
thought. Because the history of nature is charac- 
tered in his brain, therefore is he the prophet and 
discoverer of her secrets. Every known fact in 
natural science was divined by the presentiment 
of somebody, before it was actually verified. A 
man does not tie his shoe without recognizing laws 
which bind the farthest regions of nature : moon, 
plant, gas, crystal, are concrete geometry and num- 
bers. Common sense knows its own, and recog- 
nizes the fact at first sight in chemical experiment. 
The common sense of Franklin, Dalton, Davy, and 
Black, is the same common sense which made the 
arrangements which now it discovers. 



NATURE. 179 

If the identity expresses organized rest, the coun- 
ter action runs also into organization. The astron- 
omers said, ' Give us matter, and a little motion, 
and we will construct the universe. It is not 
enough that we should have matter, we must also 
have a single impulse, one shove to launch the 
mass, and generate the harmony of the centrifugal 
and centripetal forces. Once heave the ball from 
the hand, and we can show how all this mighty 
order grew.' — 'A very unreasonable postulate,' 
said the metaphysicians, ' and a plain begging of 
the question. Could you not prevail to know the 
genesis of projection, as well as the continuation 
of it ? ' Nature, meanwhile, had not waited for 
the discussion, but, right or wrong, bestowed the 
impulse, and the balls rolled. It was no great 
affair, a mere push, but the astronomers were right 
in making much of it, for there is no end to the 
consequences of the act. That famous aboriginal 
push propagates itself through all the balls of the 
system, and through every atom of every ball, 
through all the races of creatures, and through the 
history and performances of every individual. Ex- 
aggeration is in the course of things. Nature sends 
no creature, no man into the world, without adding 
a small excess of his proper quality. Given the 
planet, it is still necessary to add the impulse ; so, 
to every creature nature added a little violence of 



180 ESSAY VI. 

direction in its proper path, a shove to put it on its 
way ; hi every instance, a slight generosity, a drop 
too much. Without electricity the air would rot, 
and without this violence of direction, which men 
and women have, without a spice of bigot and 
fanatic, no excitement, no efficiency. We aim 
above the mark, to hit the mark. Every act hath 
some falsehood of exaggeration in it. And when 
now and then comes along some sad, sharp-eyed 
man, who sees how paltry a game is played, and 
refuses to play, but blabs the secret ; — how then? 
is the bird flown ? O no, the wary Nature sends a 
new troop of fairer forms, of lordlier youths, with 
a little more excess of direction to hold them fast 
to their several aim ; makes them a little wrong- 
headed in that direction in which they are rightest, 
and on goes the game again with new whirl, for a 
generation or two more. The child with his sweet 
pranks, the fool of his senses, commanded by every 
sight and sound, without any power to compare 
and rank his sensations, abandoned to a whistle or 
•d painted chip, to a lead dragoon, or a gingerbread- 
dog, individualizing everything, generalizing noth- 
ing, delighted with every new thing, lies down at 
night overpowered by the fatigue, which this day of 
continual pretty madness has incurred. But Nature 
has answered her purpose with the curly, dimpled 
lunatic. She has tasked every faculty, and has 



NATURE. 181 

secured the symmetrical growth of the bodily- 
frame, by all these attitudes and exertions, — an 
end of the first importance, which could not be 
trusted to any care less perfect than her own. 
This glitter, this opaline, lustre plays round the top 
of every toy to his eye, to insure his fidelity, and 
he is deceived to his good. We are made alive and 
kept alive by the same arts. Let the stoics say 
what they please, we do not eat for the good of 
living, but because the meat is savory and the ap- 
petite is keen. The vegetable life does not content 
itself with casting from the flower or the tree a 
single seed, but it fills the air and earth with a 
prodigality of seeds, that, if thousands perish, thou- 
sands may plant themselves, that hundreds may 
come up, that tens may live to maturity, that, at 
least, one may replace the parent. All things be- 
tray the same calculated profusion. The excess of 
fear with which the animal frame is hedged round, 
shrinking from cold, starting at sight of a snake, or 
at a sudden noise, protects us, through a multitude 
of groundless alarms, from some one real danger at 
last. The lover seeks in marriage his private felici- 
ty and perfection, with no prospective end ; and 
nature hides in his happiness her own end, namely, 
progeny, or the perpetuity of the race. 

But the craft with which the world is made, runs 
also into the mind and character of men. No man 



182 ESSAY VI. 

is quite sane ; each has a vein of folly in his compo- 
sition, a slight determination of blood to the head, 
to make sure of holding him hard to some one point 
which nature had taken to heart. Great causes 
are never tried on their merits ; hut the cause is 
reduced to particulars to suit the size of the parti- 
sans, and the contention is ever hottest on minor 
matters. Not less remarkable is the overfaith of 
each man in the importance of what he has to do 
or say. The poet, the prophet, has a higher value 
for what he utters than any hearer, and therefore it 
gets spoken. The strong, self-complacent Luther 
declares with an emphasis, not to be mistaken, that 
"God himself cannot do without wise men." Ja- 
cob Behmen and George Fox betray their egotism 
in the pertinacity of their controversial tracts, and 
James Naylor once suffered himself to be wor- 
shipped as the Christ. Each prophet comes presently 
to identify himself with his thought, and to esteem 
his hat and shoes sacred. However this may dis- 
credit such persons with the judicious, it helps 
them with the people, as it gives heat, pungency, 
and publicity to their words. A similar experience 
is not infrequent in private life. Each young and 
ardent person writes a diary, in which, when the 
hours of prayer and penitence arrive, he inscribes 
his soul. The pages thus written are, to him, 
burning and fragrant : he reads them on his knees 



NATURE. 183 

by midnight and by the morning star; he wets 
them with his tears : they are sacred ; too good for 
the world, and hardly yet to be shown to the dear- 
est friend. This is the man-child that is born to 
the soul, and her life still circulates in the babe. 
The umbilical cord has not yet been cut. After 
some time has elapsed, he begins to wish to admit 
his friend to this hallowed experience, and with hes- 
itation, yet with firmness, exposes the pages to his 
eye. Will they not burn his eyes ? The friend coldly 
turns the^mpver, and passes from the writing to 
conversation, with easy transition, which strikes the 
other party with astonishment aud vexation. He 
cannot suspect the writing itself. Days and nights 
of fervid life, of communion with angels of darkness 
and of light, have engraved their shadowy characters 
on that tear-stained book. He suspects the intelli- 
gence or the heart of his friend. Is there then no 
friend ? He cannot yet credit that one may have 
impressive experience, and yet may not know how 
to put his private fact into literature j and perhaps 
the discovery that wisdom has other tongues and 
ministers than we, that though we should hold 
our peace, the truth would not the less be spoken, 
might check injuriously the flames of our zeal. A 
man can only speak, so long as he does not feel his 
speech to be partial and inadequate. It is partial, 
but he does not see it to be so, whilst he utters it. 



184 ESSAY VI. 

As soon as he is released from the instinctive and 
particular, and sees its partiality, he shuts his 
mouth in disgust. For, no man can write any- 
thing, who does not think that what he writes is 
for the time the history of the world ; or do any- 
thing well, who does not esteem his work to be of 
importance. My work may be of none, but I 
must not think it of none, or I shall not do it with 
impunity. 

In like manner, there is throughout nature some- 
thing mocking, something that leads us on and on, 
but arrives nowhere, keeps no faith with us. All 
promise outruns .the 'performance. We live in a 
system of approximations. Every end is prospec- 
tive of some other end, which is also temporary ; 
a round and final success nowhere. We are en- 
camped in nature, not domesticated. Hunger and 
thirst lead us on to eat and to drink ; but bread 
and wine, mix and cook them how you will, leave 
us hungry and thirsty, after the stomach is full. 
It is the same with all our arts and perform- 
ances. Our music, our poetry, our language itself, 
are not satisfactions, but suggestions. The hunger 
for wealth, which reduces the planet to a garden, 
fools the eager pursuer. What is the end sought ? 
Plainly to secure the ends of good sense and beau- 
ty, from the intrusion of deformity or vulgarity of 
any kind. But what an operose method ! What 



NATURE. 185 

a train of means to secure a little conversation ! 
This palace of brick and stone, these servants, this 
.kitchen, these stables, horses and equipage, this 
bank-stock, and file of mortgages ; trade to all the 
world, country-house and cottage by the waterside, 
all for a little conversation, high, clear, and spirit- 
ual ! Could it not be had as well by beggars on the 
highway ? No, all these things came from succes- 
sive efforts of these beggars to remove friction from 
the wheels of life, and give opportunity. Conver- 
sation, character, were the avowed ends; wealth 
was good as it appeased the animal cravings, cured 
the smoky chimney, silenced the creaking door, 
brought friends together in a warm and quiet room, 
and kept the children and the dinner-table in a dif- 
ferent apartment. Thought, virtue, beauty, were 
the ends ; but it was known that men of thought 
and virtue sometimes had the headache, or wet 
feet, or could lose good time whilst the room was 
getting warm in winter days. Unluckily, in the 
exertions necessary to remove these inconveniences, 
the main attention has been diverted to this object ; 
the old aims have been lost sight of, and to remove 
friction has come to be the end. That is the ridi- 
cule of rich men, and Boston, London, Vienna, and 
now the governments generally of the world, are 
cities and governments of the rich, and the masses 
are not men, but poor men, that is, men who would 
16* 



186 ESSAY VI. 

be rich ; this is the ridicule of the class, that they 
arrive with pains and sweat and fury nowhere ; 
when all is done, it is for nothing. They are like, 
one who has interrupted the conversation of a 
company to make his speech, and now has forgot- 
ten what he went to say. The appearance strikes 
the eye everywhere of an aimless society, of aim- 
less nations. Were the ends of nature so great 
and cogent, as to exact this immense sacrifice of 
men ? 

Quite analogous to the deceits in life, there is, 
as might be expected, a similar effect on the eye 
from the face of external nature. There is in 
woods and waters a certain enticement and flattery, 
together with a failure to yield a present satisfac- 
tion. This disappointment is felt in every land- 
scape. I have seen the softness and beauty of the 
summer-clouds floating feathery overhead, enjoying, 
as it seemed, their height and privilege of motion, 
whilst yet they appeared not so much the drapery 
of this place and hour, as forelooking to some 
pavilions and gardens of festivity beyond. It is an 
odd jealousy : but the poet finds himself not near 
enough to his object. The pine-tree, the river, the 
bank of flowers before him, does not seem to be 
nature. Nature is still elsewhere. This or this is 
but outskirt and far-off reflection and echo of the 
triumph that has passed by, and is now at its 



NATURE. 187 

glancing splendor and heyday, perchance in the 
neighboring fields, or, if you stand in the field, then 
in the adjacent woods. The present object shall 
give you this sense of stillness that follows a pa- 
geant which has just gone by. What splendid dis- 
tance, what recesses of ineffable pomp and loveliness 
in the sunset ! But who can go where they are, 
or lay his hand or plant his foot thereon ? Off they 
fall from the round world forever and ever. It is 
the same among the men and women, as among 
the silent trees ; always a referred existence, an 
absence, never a presence and satisfaction. Is it, 
that beauty can never be grasped ? in persons and 
in landscape is equally inaccessible ? The accepted 
and betrothed lover has lost the wildest charm of 
his maiden in her acceptance of him. She was 
heaven whilst he pursued her as a star : she cannot 
be heaven, if she stoops to such a one as he. 

"What shall we say of this omnipresent appear- 
ance of that first projectile impulse, of this flattery 
and balking of so many well-meaning creatures ? 
Must we not suppose somewhere in the universe 
a slight treachery and derision ? Are we not en- 
gaged to a serious resentment of this use that is 
made of us ? Are we tickled trout, and fools of 
nature ? One look at the face of heaven and earth 
lays all petulance at rest, and soothes us to wiser 
convictions. To the intelligent, nature converts 



188 ESSAY VI. 

itself into a vast promise, and will not be rashly 
explained. Her secret is untold. Many and many 
an (Edipus arrives : he has the whole mystery teem- 
ing in his brain. Alas ! the same sorcery has spoiled 
his skill ; no syllable can he shape on his lips. 
Her mighty orbit vaults like the fresh rainbow into 
the deep, but no archangel's wing was yet strong 
enough to follow it, and report of the return of the 
curve. But it also appears, that our actions are 
seconded and disposed to greater conclusions than 
we designed. We are escorted on every hand 
through life by spiritual agents, and a beneficent 
purpose lies in wait for us. We cannot bandy 
words with nature, or deal with her as we deal 
with persons. If we measure our individual forces 
against hers, we may easily feel as if we were the 
sport of an insuperable destiny. But if, instead of 
identifying ourselves with the work, we feel that 
the soul of the workman streams through us, we 
shall find the peace of the morning dwelling first 
in our hearts, and the fathomless powers of gravity 
and chemistry, and, over them, of life, preexisting 
within us in their highest form. 

The uneasiness which the thought of our help- 
lessness in the chain of causes occasions us, results 
from looking too much at one condition of nature, 
namely, Motion. But the drag is never taken 
from the wheel. Wherever the impulse exceeds, 



NATURE. 189 

the Rest or Identity insinuates its compensation. 
All over the wide fields of earth grows the pru- 
nella or self-heal. After every foolish day we sleep 
off the fumes and furies of its hours ; and though 
we are always engaged with particulars, and often 
enslaved to them, we bring with us to every exper- 
iment the innate universal laws. These, while 
they exist in the mind as ideas, stand around us in 
nature forever embodied, a present sanity to expose 
and cure the insanity of men. Our servitude to 
particulars betrays us into a hundred foolish expecta- 
tions. We anticipate a new era from the invention 
of a locomotive, or a balloon ; the new engine 
brings with it the old checks. They say that by 
electro-magnetism, your salad shall be grown from 
the seed, whilst your fowl is roasting for dinner : it 
is a symbol of our modern aims and endeavors, — 
of our condensation and acceleration of objects : 
but nothing is gained : nature cannot be cheated : 
man's life is but seventy salads long, grow they 
swift or grow they slow. In these checks and im- 
possibilities, however, we find our advantage, not 
less than in the impulses. Let the victory fall 
where it will, we are on that side. And the knowl- 
edge that we traverse the whole scale of being, 
from the centre to the poles of nature, and have 
some stake in every possibility, lends that sublime 
lustre to death, which philosophy and religion have 



190 ESSAY VI. 

too outwardly and literally striven to express in 
the popular doctrine of the immortality of the soul. 
The reality is more excellent than the report. 
Here is no ruin, no discontinuity, no spent ball. 
The divine circulations never rest nor linger. Na- 
ture is the incarnation of a thought, and turns to a 
thought again, as ice becomes water and gas. The 
world is mind precipitated, and the volatile essence 
is forever escaping again into the state of free 
thought. Hence the virtue and pungency of the 
influence on the mind, of natural objects, whether 
inorganic or organized. Man imprisoned, man 
crystallized, man vegetative, speaks to man imper- 
sonated. That power which does not respect 
quantity, which makes the whole and the particle 
its equal channel, delegates its smile to the morn- 
ing, and distils its essence into every drop of rain. 
Every moment instructs, and every object : for wis- 
dom is infused into every form. It has been poured 
into us as blood ; it convulsed us as pain ; it slid 
into us as pleasure ; it enveloped us in dull, melan- 
choly days, or in days of cheerful labor : we did not 
guess its essence, until after a long time. 



POLITICS. 



Gold and iron are good 

To buy iron and gold ; 

All earth's fleece and food 

For their like are sold- 

Boded Merlin wise, 

Proved Napoleon great, — 

Nor kind nor coinage buys 

Aught above its rate. 

Fear, Craft, and Avarice 

Cannot rear a State. 

Out of dust to build 

What is more than dust, — 

Walls Amphion piled 

Phoebus stablish must. 

When the Muses nine 

With the Virtues meet, 

Find to their design 

An Atlantic seat, 

By green orchard boughs 

Fended from the heat, 

Where the statesman ploughs 

Furrow for the wheat ; 

When the Church is social worth, 

When the state-house is the hearth, 

Then the perfect State is come, 

The republican at home. 



ESSAY VII. 
POLITICS. 



In dealing with the State, we ought to remem- 
ber that its institutions are not aboriginal, though 
they existed before we were born : that they are not 
superior to the citizen : that every one of them was 
once the act of a single man : every law and usage 
was a man's expedient to meet a particular case : 
that they all are imitable, all alterable ; we may 
make as good ; we may make better. Society is an 
illusion to the young citizen. It lies before him in 
rigid repose, with certain names, men, and institu- 
tions, rooted like oak-trees to the centre, round which 
all arrange themselves the best they can. But the 
old statesman knows that society is fluid ; there are 
no such roots and centres ; but any particle may 
suddenly become the centre of the movement, and 
compel the system to gyrate round it, as every 
man of strong will, like Pisistratus, or Cromwell, 
does for a time, and every man of truth, like Plato, 
17 



194 ESSAY VII. 

or Paul, does forever. But politics rest on neces- 
sary foundations, and cannot be treated with levity. 
Republics abound in young civilians, who believe 
that the laws make the city, that grave modifica- 
tions of the policy and modes of living, and em- 
ployments of the population, that commerce, edu- 
cation, and religion, may be voted in or out ; and 
that any measure, though it were absurd, may be 
imposed on a people, if only you can get sufficient 
voices to make it a law. But the wise know that 
foolish legislation is a rope of sand, which perishes 
in the twisting ; that the State must follow, and 
not lead the character and progress of the citizen ; 
the strongest usurper is quickly got rid of; and 
they only who build on Ideas, build for eternity ; 
and that the form of government which prevails, 
is the expression of what cultivation exists in the 
population which permits it. The law is only a 
memorandum. We are superstitious, and esteem 
the statute somewhat : so much life as it has in the 
character of living men, is its force. The statute 
stands there to say, yesterday we agreed so and so, 
but how feel ye this article to-day ? Our statute 
is a currency, which we stamp with our own por- 
trait : it soon becomes unrecognizable, and in pro- 
cess of time will return to the mint. Nature is not 
democratic, nor limited-monarchical, but despotic, 
and will not be fooled or abated of any jot of 



POLITICS. 195 

her authority, by the pertest of her sons : and as 
fast as the public mind is opened to more intelli- 
gence, the code is seen to be brute and stammer- 
ing. It speaks not articulately, and must be made 
to. Meantime the education of the general mind 
never stops. The reveries of the true and sim- 
ple are prophetic. What the tender poetic youth 
dreams, and prays, and paints to-day, but shuns 
the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the 
resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried 
as grievance and bill of rights through conflict 
and war, and then shall be triumphant law and 
establishment for a hundred years, until it gives 
place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures. The 
history of the State sketches in coarse outline the 
progress of thought, and follows at a distance the 
delicacy of culture and of aspiration. 

The theory of politics, which has possessed the 
mind of men, and which they have expressed the 
best they could in their laws and in their revolu- 
tions, considers persons and property as the two 
objects for whose protection government exists. 
Of persons, all have equal rights, in virtue of being 
identical in nature. This interest, of course, with 
its whole power demands a democracy. Whilst 
the rights of all as persons are equal, in virtue of 
their access to reason, their rights in property are 
very unequal. One man owns his clothes, and 



196 ESSAY VII. 

another owns a county. This accident, depending, 
primarily, on the skill and virtue of the parties, of 
which there is every degree, and, secondarily, on 
patrimony, falls unequally, and its rights, of course^ 
are unequal. Personal rights, universally the same, 
demand a government framed on the ratio of the 
census : property demands a government framed on 
the ratio of owners and of owning. Laban, who 
has flocks and herds, wishes them looked after by an 
officer on the frontiers, lest the Midianites shall drive 
them off, and pays a tax to that end. Jacob has no 
flocks or herds, and no fear of the Midianites, and 
pays no tax to the officer. It seemed fit that Laban 
and Jacob should have equal rights to elect the 
officer, who is to defend their persons, but that La- 
ban, and not Jacob, should elect the officer who is to 
guard the sheep and cattle. And, if question arise 
whether additional officers or watch-lowers should 
be provided, must not Laban and Isaac, and those 
who must sell part of their herds to buy protection 
for the rest, judge better of this, and with more 
right, than Jacob, who, because he is a youth and 
a traveller, eats their bread and not his own ? 

In the earliest society the proprietors made their 
own wealth, and so long as it comes to the owners 
in the direct way, no other opinion would arise in 
any equitable community, than that property should 
make the law for property, and persons the law for 
persons. 



l'OLITICS. 197 

Bat property passes through donation or inherit- 
ance to those who do not create it. Gift, in one 
case, makes it as really the new owner's, as labor 
made it the first owner's : in the other case, of pat- 
rimony, the law makes an ownership, which will 
be valid in each man's view according to the es- 
timate which he sets on the public tranquillity. 

It was not, however, found easy to embody the 
readily admitted principle, that property should 
make law for property, and persons for persons : 
since persons and property mixed themselves in 
every transaction. At last it seemed settled, that 
the rightful distinction was, that the proprietors 
should have more elective franchise than non-pro- 
prietors, on the Spartan principle of "calling that 
which is just, equal ; not that which is equal, just." 

That principle no longer looks so self-evident as 
it appeared in former times, partly, because doubts 
have arisen whether too much weight had not been 
allowed in the laws, to property, and such a struc- 
ture given to our usages, as allowed the rich to en- 
croach on the poor, and to keep them poor ; but 
mainly, because there is an instinctive sense, how- 
ever obscure and yet inarticulate, that the whole 
constitution of property, on its present tenures, is 
injurious, and its influence on persons deteriorating 
and degrading ; that truly, the only interest for the 
consideration of the State, is persons : that property 
17* 



198 ESSAY VII. 

will always follow persons ; that the highest end 
of government is the culture of men : and if men 
can be educated, the institutions will share their 
improvement, and the moral sentiment will write 
the law of the land. 

If it be not easy to settle the equity of this ques- 
tion, the peril is less when we take note of our nat- 
ural defences. We are kept by better guards than 
the vigilance of such magistrates as we commonly 
elect. Society always consists, in greatest part, of 
young and foolish persons. The old, who have 
seen through the hypocrisy of courts and statesmen, 
die, and leave no wisdom to their sons. They be- 
lieve their own newspaper, as their fathers did at 
their age. With such an ignorant and deceivable 
majority, States would soon run to ruin, but that 
there are limitations, beyond which the folly and 
ambition of governors cannot go. Things have 
their laws, as well as men ; and things refuse to 
be trifled with. Property will be protected. Corn 
will not grow, unless it is planted and manured ; 
but the farmer will not plant or hoe it, unless the 
chances are a hundred to one, that he will cut and 
harvest it. Under any forms, persons and property 
must and will have their just sway. They exert 
their power, as steadily as matter its attraction. 
Cover up a pound of earth never so cunningly, di- 
vide and subdivide it; melt it to liquid, convert it 



POLITICS. 199 

to gas; it will always weigh a pound: it will 
always attract and resist other matter, by the full 
virtue of one pound weight; — and the attributes 
of a person, his wit and his moral energy, will exer- 
cise, under any law or extinguishing tyranny, their 
proper force, — if not overtly, then covertly ; if not 
for the law, then against it; if not wholesomely, then 
poisonously ; with right, or by might. 

The boundaries of personal influence it is impos- 
sible to fix, as persons are organs of moral or super- 
natural force. Under the dominion of an idea, 
which possesses the minds of multitudes, as civil 
freedom, or the religious sentiment, the powers of 
persons are no longer subjects of calculation. A 
nation of men unanimously bent on freedom, or 
conquest, can easily confound the arithmetic of sta- 
tists, and achieve extravagant actions, out of all 
proportion to their means ; as, the Greeks, the Sara- 
cens, the Swiss, the Americans, and the French 
have done. 

In like manner, to every particle of property be- 
longs its own attraction. A cent is the representa- 
tive of a certain quantity of corn or other commod- 
ity. Its value is in the necessities of the animal 
man. It is so much warmth, so much bread, so 
much water, so much land. The law may do 
what it will with the owner of property, its just 
power will still attach to the cent. The law may 
in a mad freak say, that all shall have power ex- 



200 ESSAY VII. 

cept the owners of property : they shall have no 
vote. Nevertheless, by a higher law, the property 
will, year after year, write every statute that re- 
spects property. The non-proprietor will be the 
scribe of the proprietor. What the owners wish 
to do, the whole power of property will do, either 
through the law, or else in defiance of it. Of course, 
I speak of all the property, not merely of the great 
estates. When the rich are outvoted, as frequently 
happens, it is the joint treasury of the poor which 
exceeds their accumulations. Every man owns 
something, if it is only a cow, or a wheelbarrow, 
or his arms, and so has that property to dispose of. 
The same necessity which secures the rights of 
person and property against the malignity or folly 
of the magistrate, determines the form and methods 
of governing, which are proper to each nation, and 
to its habit of thought, and nowise transferable to 
other states of society. In this country, we are 
very vain of our political institutions, which are 
singular in this, that they sprung, within the mem- 
ory of living men, from the character and condi- 
tion of the people, which they still express with 
sufficient fidelity, — and we ostentatiously prefer 
them to any other in history. They are not better, 
but only fitter for us. We may be wise in assert- 
ing the advantage in modern times of the demo- 
cratic form, but to other states of society, in which 



POLITICS. 201 

religion consecrated the monarchical, that and not 
this was expedient. Democracy is better for us, be- 
cause the religions sentiment of the present time 
accords better with it. Born democrats, we are no- 
wise qualified to judge of monarchy, which, to our 
fathers living in the monarchical idea, was also rel- 
atively right. But our institutions, though in coin- 
cidence with the spirit of the age, have not any 
exemption from the practical defects which have dis- 
credited other forms. Every actual State is corrupt. 
Good men must not obey the laws too well. What 
satire on government can equal the severity of cen- 
sure conveyed in the word politic, which now for 
ages has signified cunning, intimating that the 
State is a trick ? 

The same benign necessity and the same practi- 
cal abuse appear in the parties into which each State 
divides itself, of opponents and defenders of the 
administration of the government. Parties are also 
founded on instincts, and have better guides to their 
own humble aims than the sagacity of their leaders. 
They have nothing perverse in their origin, but 
rudely mark some real and lasting relation. We 
might as wisely reprove the east wind, or the frost, 
as a political party, whose members, for the most 
part, could give no account of their position, but 
stand for the defence of those interests in which 
they find themselves. Our quarrel with them be- 



202 ESSAY VII. 

gins, when they quit this deep natural ground at 
the bidding of some leader, and, obeying personal 
considerations, throw themselves into the mainte- 
nance and defence of points, nowise belonging to 
their system. A party is perpetually corrupted by 
personality. Whilst we absolve the association 
from dishonesty, we cannot extend the same chari- 
ty to their leaders. They reap the rewards of the 
docility and zeal of the masses which they direct. 
Ordinarily, our parties are parties of circumstance, 
and not of principle ; as, the planting interest in 
conflict with the commercial ; the party of capital- 
ists, and that of operatives ; parties which are iden- 
tical in their moral character, and which can easily 
change ground with each other, in the support of 
many of their measures. Parties of principle, as, 
religious sects, or the party of free-trade, of univer- 
sal suffrage, of abolition of slavery, of abolition of 
capital punishment, degenerate into personalities, or 
would inspire enthusiasm. The vice of our lead- 
ing parties in this country (which may be cited as 
a fair specimen of these societies of opinion) is, 
that they do not plant themselves on the deep and 
necessary grounds to which they are respectively 
entitled, but lash themselves to fury in the carry- 
ing of some local and momentary measure, nowise 
useful to the commonwealth. Of the two great 
parties, which, at this hour, almost share the nation 



POLITICS. 203 

between them, I should say, that, one has the best 
cause, and the other contains the best men. The 
philosopher, the poet, or the religious man, will, of 
course, wish to cast his vote with the democrat, for 
free-trade, for wide suffrage, for the abolition of 
legal cruelties in the penal code, and for facilitating 
in every manner the access of the young and the 
poor to the sources of wealth and power. But he 
can rarely accept the persons whom the so-called 
popular party propose to him as representatives of 
these liberalities. They have not at heart the ends 
which give to the name of democracy what hope 
and virtue are in it. The spirit of our American 
radicalism is destructive and aimless : it is not lov- 
ing ; it has no ulterior and divine ends ; but is de- 
structive only out of hatred and selfishness. On 
the other side, the conservative party, composed of 
the most moderate, able, and cultivated part of the 
population, is timid, and merely defensive of prop- 
erty. It vindicates no right, it aspires to no real 
good, it brands no crime, it proposes no generous 
policy, it does not build, nor write, nor cherish the 
arts, nor foster religion, nor establish schools, nor 
encourage science, nor emancipate the slave, nor 
befriend the poor, or the Indian, or the immigrant. 
From neither party, when in power, has the world 
any benefit to expect in science, art, or humanity, 
at all commensurate with the resources of the na- 
tion. 



204 ESSAY VII. 

I do not for these defects despair of our republic. 
We are not at the mercy of any waves of chance. 
In the strife of ferocious parties, human nature al- 
ways finds itself cherished, as the children of the 
convicts at Botany Bay are found to have as healthy 
a moral sentiment as other children. Citizens of 
feudal states are alarmed at our democratic institu- 
tions lapsing into anarchy ; and the older and more 
cautious among ourselves are learning from Euro- 
peans to look with some terror at our turbulent 
freedom. It is said that in our license of constru- 
ing the Constitution, and in the despotism of public 
opinion, we have no anchor ; and one foreign ob- 
server thinks he has found the safeguard in the 
sanctity of Marriage among us ; and another thinks 
he has found it in our Calvinism. Fisher Ames 
expressed the popular security more wisely, when 
he compared a monarchy and a republic, saying, 
" that a monarchy is a merchantman, which sails 
well, but will sometimes strike on a rock, and go to 
the bottom ; whilst a republic is a raft, which would 
never sink, but then your feet are always in water." 
No forms can have any dangerous importance, whilst 
we are befriended by the laws of things. It makes 
no difference how many tons weight of atmosphere 
presses on our heads, so long as the same pressure 
resists it within the lungs. Augment the mass a 
thousand fold, it cannot begin to crush us, as long 



POLITICS. 205 

as reaction is equal to action. The fact of two 
poles, of two forces, centripetal and centrifugal, is 
universal, and each force by its own activity de- 
velops the other. Wild liberty develops iron con- 
science. Want of liberty, by strengthening law 
and decorum, stupefies conscience. ' Lynch-law ' 
prevails only where there is greater hardihood and 
self-subsistency in the leaders. A mob cannot be 
a permanency : everybody's interest requires that it 
should not exist, and only justice satisfies all. 

We must trust infinitely to the beneficent neces- 
sity which shines through all laws. Human nature 
expresses itself in them as characteristically as in 
statues, or songs, or railroads, and an abstract of the 
codes of nations would be a transcript of the com- 
mon conscience. Governments have their origin 
in the moral identity of men. Reason for one is 
seen to be reason for another, and for every other. 
There is a middle measure which satisfies all par- 
ties, be they never so many, or so resolute for their 
own. Every man finds a sanction for his simplest 
claims and deeds in decisions of his own mind, 
which he calls Truth and Holiness. In these de- 
cisions all the citizens find a perfect agreement, and 
only in these ; not in what is good to eat, good to 
wear, good use of time, or what amount of land, or 
of public aid, each is entitled to claim. This truth 
and justice men presently endeavor to make ap- 
18 



206 ESSAY VII. 

plication of, to the measuring of land, the apportion- 
ment of service, the protection of life and property. 
Their first endeavors, no doubt, are very awkward. 
Yet absolute right is the first governor; or, every 
government is an impure theocracy. The idea, af- 
ter which each community is aiming to make and 
mend its law, is, the will of the wise man. The 
wise man, it cannot find in nature, and it makes 
awkward but earnest efforts to secure his govern- 
ment by contrivance ; as, by causing the entire 
people to give their voices on every measure ; or, 
by a double choice to get the representation of the 
whole ; or, by a selection of the best citizens ; or, 
to secure the advantages of efficiency and internal 
peace, by confiding the government to one, who 
may himself select his agents. All forms of govern- 
ment symbolize an immortal government, common 
to all dynasties and independent of numbers, per- 
fect where two men exist, perfect where there is 
only one man. 

Every man's nature is a sufficient advertisement 
to him of the character of his fellows. My right 
and my wrong, is their right and their wrong. 
Whilst I do what is fit for me, and abstain from 
what is unfit, my neighbor and I shall often agree 
in our means, and work together for a time to one 
end. But whenever I find my dominion over my- 
self not sufficient for me, and undertake the direc- 



POLITICS. 207 

tion of him also, I overstep the truth, and come into 
false relations to him. I may have so much more 
skill or strength than he, that he cannot express 
adequately his sense of wrong, but it is a lie, and 
hurts like a lie both him and me. Love and nature 
cannot maintain the assumption : it must be execut- 
ed by a practical lie, namely, by force. This un- 
dertaking for another, is the blunder which stands 
in colossal ugliness in the governments of the world. 
It is the same thing in numbers, as in a pair, only 
not quite so intelligible. I can see well enough a 
great difference between my setting myself down 
to a self-control, and my going to make somebody 
else act after my views : but when a quarter of the 
human race assume to tell me what I must do, I 
may be too much disturbed by the circumstances 
to see so clearly the absurdity of their command. 
Therefore, all public ends look vague and quixotic 
beside private ones. For, any laws but those 
which men make for themselves, are laughable. 
If I put myself in the place of my child, and we 
stand in one thought, and see that things are thus 
or thus, that perception is law for him and me. 
We are both there, both act. But if, without car- 
rying him into the thought, I look over into his 
plot, and, guessing how it is with him, ordain this 
or that, he will never obey me. This is the history 
of governments, — one man does something which 



208 ESSAY VII. 

is to bind another. A man who cannot be acquaint- 
ed with me, taxes me ; looking from afar at me, 
ordains that a part of my labor shall go to this or 
that whimsical end, not as I, but as he happens to 
fancy. Behold the consequence. Of all debts, 
men are least willing to pay the taxes. What a 
satire is this on government ! Everywhere they 
think they get their money's worth, except for 
these. 

Hence, the less government we have, the better, 
— the fewer laws, and the less confided power. 
The antidote to this abuse of formal Government, 
is, the influence of private character, the growth of 
the Individual ; the appearance of the principal to 
supersede the proxy ; the appearance of the wise 
man, of whom the existing government is, it must 
be owned, but a shabby imitation. That which all 
things tend to educe, which freedom, cultivation, 
intercourse, revolutions, go to form and deliver, is 
character ; that is the end of nature, to reach unto 
this coronation of her king. To educate the wise 
man, the State exists ; and with the appearance of 
the wise man, the State expires. The appearance 
of character makes the State unnecessary. The 
wise man is the State. He needs no army, fort, or 
navy, — he loves men too well ; no bribe, or feast, 
or palace, to draw friends to him ; no vantage 
ground, no favorable circumstance. He needs no 



POLITICS. 209 

library, for he has not done thinking ; no church, 
for he is a prophet ; no statute book, for he has the 
lawgiver ; no money, for he is value ; no road, for 
he is at home where he is ; no experience, for the 
life of the creator shoots through him, and looks 
from his eyes. He has no personal friends, for he 
who has the spell to draw the prayer and piety of 
all men unto him, needs not husband and educate 
a few, to share with him a select and poetic life. 
His relation to men is angelic ; his memory is myrrh 
to them ; his presence, frankincense and flowers. 

We think our civilization near its meridian, but 
we are yet only at the cock-crowing and the morn- 
ing star. In our barbarous society the influence of 
character is in its infancy. As a political power, as 
the rightful lord who is to tumble all rulers from 
their chairs, its presence is hardly yet suspected. 
Malthus and Ricardo quite omit it; the Annual 
Register is silent ; in the Conversations' Lexicon, 
it is not set down ; the President's Message, the 
Queen's Speech, have not mentioned it ; and yet 
it is never nothing. Every thought which genius 
and piety throw into the world, alters the world. 
The gladiators in the lists of power feel, through 
all their frocks of force and simulation, the presence 
of worth. I think the very strife of trade and 
ambition are confession of this divinity ; and suc- 



18 



210 ESSAY VII. 

cesses in those fields are the poor amends, the fig- 
leaf with which the shamed soul attempts to hide 
its nakedness. I find the like unwilling homage in 
all quarters. It is because we know how much is 
due from us, that we are impatient to show some 
petty talent as a substitute for worth. We are 
haunted by a conscience of this right to grandeur 
of character, and are false to it. But each of us 
has some talent, can do somewhat useful, or 
graceful, or formidable, or amusing, or lucrative. 
That we do, as an apology to others and to our- 
selves, for not reaching the mark of a good and 
equal life. But it does not satisfy lis, whilst we 
thrust it on the notice of our companions. It may 
throw dust in their eyes, but does not smooth our 
own brow, or give us the tranquillity of the strong 
when we walk abroad. We do penance as we go. 
Our talent is a sort of expiation, and we are con- 
strained to reflect on our splendid moment, with a 
certain humiliation, as somewhat too fine, and not 
as one act of many acts, a fair expression of our 
permanent energy. Most persons of ability meet 
in society with a kind of tacit appeal. Each seems 
to say, ' I am not all here.' Senators and presi- 
dents have climbed so high with pain enough, not 
because they think the place specially agreeable, but 
as an apology for real worth, and to vindicate their 



POLITICS. 211 

manhood in our eyes. This conspicuous chair is 
their compensation to themselves for being of a 
poor, cold, hard nature. They must do what they 
can. Like one class of forest animals, they have 
nothing but a prehensile tail : climb they must, or 
crawl. If a man found himself so rich-natured 
that he could enter into strict relations with the 
best persons, and make life serene around him 
by the dignity and sweetness of his behavior, could 
he afford to circumvent the favor of the caucus 
and the press, and covet relations so hollow and 
pompous, as those of a politician ? Surely no- 
body would be a charlatan, who could afford to be 
sincere. 

The tendencies of the times favor the idea of 
self-government, and leave the individual, for all 
code, to the rewards and penalties of his own con- 
stitution, which work with more energy than we 
believe, whilst we depend on artificial restraints. 
The movement in this direction has been very 
marked in modern history. Much has been blind 
and discreditable, but the nature of the revolution 
is not affected by the vices of the revolters ; for 
this is a purely moral force. It was never adopted 
by any party in history, neither can be. It sepa- 
rates the individual from all party, and unites him, 
at the same time, to the race. It promises a recog- 



212 



ESSAV VII. 



nition of higher rights than those of personal free- 
dom, or the security of property. A man has a 
right to be employed, to be trusted, to be loved, to 
be revered. The power of love, as the basis of a 
State, has never been tried. We must not imagine 
that all things are lapsing into confusion, if every 
tender protestant be not compelled to bear his part 
in certain social conventions : nor doubt that roads 
can be built, letters carried, and the fruit of labor 
secured, when the government of force is at an end. 
Are our methods now so excellent that all competi- 
tion is hopeless? could not a nation of friends 
even devise better ways ? On the other hand, let 
not the most conservative and timid fear anything 
from a premature surrender of the bayonet, and the 
system of force. For, according to the order of 
nature, which is quite superior to our will, it stands 
thus ; there will always be a government of force, 
where men are selfish ; and when they are pure 
enough to abjure the code of force, they will be 
wise enough to see how these public ends of the 
post-office, of the highway, of commerce, and the 
exchange of property, of museums and libraries, of 
institutions of art and science, can be answered. 

We live in a very low state of the world, and 
pay unwilling tribute to governments founded on 
force. There is not, among the most religious and 



POLITICS. 213 

instructed men of the most religious and civil na- 
tions, a reliance on the moral sentiment, and a suf- 
ficient belief in the unity of things to persuade 
them that society can be maintained without artifi- 
cial restraints, as well as the solar system ; or that 
the private citizen might be reasonable, and a good 
neighbor, without the hint of a jail or a confiscation. 
What is strange too, there never was in any man 
sufficient faith in the power of rectitude, to inspire 
him with the broad design of renovating the State 
on the principle of right and love. All those who 
have pretended this design, have been partial re- 
formers, and have admitted in some manner the 
supremacy of the bad State. I do not call to 
mind a single human being who has steadily de- 
nied the authority of the laws, on the simple ground 
of his own moral nature. Such designs, full of 
genius and full of fate as they are, are not enter- 
tained except avowedly as air-pictures. If the 
individual who exhibits them, dare to think them 
practicable, he disgusts scholars and churchmen; 
and men of talent, and women of superior senti- 
ments, cannot hide their contempt. Not the less 
does nature continue to fill the heart of youth with 
suggestions of this enthusiasm, and there are now 
men, — if indeed I can speak in the plural num- 
ber, — more exactly, I will say, I have just 



214 ESSAY VII. 

been conversing with one man, to whom no weight 
of adverse experience will make it for a moment 
appear impossible, that thousands of human beings 
might exercise towards each other the grandest and 
simplest sentiments, as well as a knot of friends, or 
a pair of lovers. 



NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 



In countless upward-striving waves 

The moon- drawn tide -wave strives : 

In thousand far-transplanted grafts 

The parent fruit survives ; 

So, in the new-born millions, 

The perfect Adam lives. 

~Not less are summer-mornings dear 

To every child they wake, 

And each with novel life his sphere 

Fills for his proper sake. 



ESSAY VIII. 
NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 



I cannot often enough say, that a man is only a 
relative and representative nature. Each is a hint 
of the truth, but far enough from being that truth, 
which yet he quite newly and inevitably suggests 
to us. If I seek it in him, I shall not find it. 
Could any man conduct into me the pure stream 
of that which he pretends to be ! Long after- 
wards, I find that quality elsewhere which he prom- 
ised me. The genius of the Platonists is intoxi- 
cating to the student, yet how few particulars of it 
can I detach from all their books. The man mo- 
mentarily stands for the thought, but will not bear 
examination ; and a society of men will cursorily 
represent well enough a certain quality and culture, 
for example, chivalry or beauty of manners, but 
separate them, and there is no gentleman and no 
lady in the group. The least hint sets us on the 
pursuit of a character, which no man realizes. We 



218 ESSAY VIII. 

have such exorbitant eyes, that on seeing the 
smallest arc, we complete the curve, and when the 
curtain is lifted from the diagram which it seemed 
to veil, we are vexed to mid that no more was 
drawn, than just that fragment of an arc which we 
first beheld. We are greatly too liberal in our con- 
struction of each other's faculty and promise. Ex- 
actly what the parties have already done, they shall 
do again ; but that which we inferred from their 
nature and inception, they will not do. That is in 
nature, but not in them. That happens in the 
world, which we often witness in a public debate. 
Each of the speakers expresses himself imperfectly : 
no one of them hears much that another says, such 
is the preoccupation of mind of each ; and the au- 
dience, who have only to hear and not to speak, 
judge very wisely and superiorly how wrongheaded 
and unskilful is each of the debaters to his own 
affair. Great men or men of great gifts you shall 
easily find, but symmetrical men never. When I 
meet a pure intellectual force, or a generosity of 
affection, I believe, here then is man ; and am pres- 
ently mortified by the discovery, that this indi- 
vidual is no more available to his own or to the 
general ends, than his companions ; because the 
power which drew my respect, is not supported by 
the total symphony of his talents. All persons 
exist to society by some shining trait of beauty or 



NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 219 

Utility, which they have. We borrow the pro- 
portions of the man from that one fine feature, 
and finish the portrait symmetrically; which is 
false ; for the rest of his body is small or deformed. 
I observe a person who makes a good public ap- 
pearance, and conclude thence the perfection of his 
private character, on which this is based ; but he 
lias no private character. He is a graceful cloak 
or lay-figure for holidays. All our poets, heroes, 
and saints, fail utterly in some one or in many parts 
to satisfy our idea, fail to draw our spontaneous 
interest, and so leave us without any hope of reali- 
zation but in our own future. Our exaggeration 
of all fine characters arises from the fact, that we 
identify each in turn with the soul. But there are 
no such men as we fable ; no Jesus, nor Pericles, 
nor Caesar, nor Angelo, nor Washington, such as we 
have made. We consecrate a great deal of non- 
sense, because it was allowed by great men. There 
is none without his foible. I verily believe if an 
angel should come to chant the chorus of the 
moral law, he would eat too much gingerbread, or 
take liberties with private letters, or do some pre- 
cious atrocity. It is bad enough, that our geniuses 
cannot do anything useful, but it is worse that no 
man is fit for society, who has fine traits. He is 
admired at a distance, but he cannot come near 
without appearing a cripple. The men of fine 



220 ESSAY VIII. 

parts protect themselves by solitude, or by courtesy, 
or by satire, or by an acid worldly manner, each con- 
cealing, as he best can, his incapacity for useful asso- 
ciation, but they want either love or self-reliance. 

Our native love of reality joins with this expe- 
rience to teach us a little reserve, and to dissuade 
a too sudden surrender to the brilliant qualities of 
persons. Young people admire talents or particu- 
lar excellences ; as we grow older, we value total 
powers and effects, as, the impression, the quality, 
the spirit of men and things. The genius is all. 
The man, — it is his system : we do not try a soli- 
tary word or act, but his habit. The acts which 
you praise, I praise not, since they are departures 
from his faith, and are mere compliances. The 
magnetism which arranges tribes and races in one 
polarity, is alone to be respected ; the men are steel- 
filings. Yet we unjustly select a particle, and say, 
1 O steel-filing number one ! what heart-drawings 
I feel to thee ! what prodigious virtues are these of 
thine ! how constitutional to thee, and incommuni- 
cable ! ' Whilst we speak, the loadstone is with- 
drawn ; down falls our filing in a heap with the 
rest, and we continue our mummery to the wretched 
shaving. Let us go for universals ; for the mag- 
netism, not for the needles. Human life and its 
persons are poor empirical pretensions. A personal 
influence is an ignis fatuus. If they say, it is 



NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 221 

great, it is great ; if they say, it is small, it is small ; 
you see it, and you see it not, by turns ; it bor- 
rows all its size from the momentary estimation of 
the speakers : the Will-of-the-wisp vanishes if you 
go too near, vanishes if you go too far, and only 
blazes at one angle. Who can tell if Washington 
be a great man, or no ? Who can tell if Franklin 
be ? Yes, or any but the twelve, or six, or three 
great gods of fame ? And they, too, loom and fade 
before the eternal. 

We are amphibious creatures, weaponed for two 
elements, having two sets of faculties, the particu- 
lar and the catholic. We adjust our instrument 
for general observation, and sweep the heavens as 
easily as we pick out a single figure in the terres- 
trial landscape. We are practically skilful in de- 
tecting elements, for which we have no place in 
our theory, and no name. Thus we are very sen- 
sible of an atmospheric influence in men and in 
bodies of men, not accounted for in an arithmetical 
addition of all their measurable properties. There 
is a genius of a nation, which is not to be found 
in the numerical citizens, but which characterizes 
the society. England, strong, punctual, practical, 
well-spoken England, I should not find, if I should 
go to the island to seek it. In the parliament, in 
the play-house, at dinner-tables, I might see a great 
number of rich, ignorant, book-read, conventional, 
19* 



222 ESSAY VIII. 

proud men, — many old women, — and not any- 
where the Englishman who made the good 
speeches, combined the accurate engines, and did 
the bold and nervous deeds. It is even worse in 
America, where, from the intellectual quickness of 
the race, the genius of the country is more splen- 
did in its promise, and more slight in its perform- 
ance. Webster cannot do the work of Webster. 
We conceive distinctly enough the French, the 
Spanish, the German genius, and it is not the less 
real, that perhaps we should not meet in either of 
those nations, a single individual who corresponded 
with the type. We infer the spirit of the nation 
in great measure from the language, which is a 
sort of monument, to which each forcible individ- 
ual in a course of many hundred years has contrib- 
uted a stone. And, universally, a good example of 
this social force, is the veracity of language, which 
cannot be debauched. In any controversy con- 
cerning morals, an appeal may be made with safety 
to the sentiments, which the language of the peo- 
ple expresses. Proverbs, words, and grammar in- 
flections convey the public sense with more purity 
and precision, than the wisest individual. 

In the famous dispute with the Nominalists, the 
Realists had a good deal of reason. General ideas 
are essences. They are our gods: they round and 
ennoble the most partial and sordid way of living. 



NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 223 

Oui' proclivity to details cannot quite degrade our 
life, and divest it of poetry. The day-laborer is 
reckoned as standing at the foot of the social scale, 
yet he is saturated with the laws of the world. 
His measures are the hours ; morning and night, 
solstice and equinox, geometry, astronomy, and all 
the lovely accidents of nature play through his 
mind. Money, which represents the prose of life, 
and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without 
an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful 
as roses. Property keeps the accounts of the world, 
and is always moral. The property will be found 
where the labor, the wisdom, and the virtue have 
been in nations, in classes, and (the whole life-time 
considered, with the compensations) in the indi- 
vidual also. How wise the world appears, when 
the laws and usages of nations are largely detailed, 
and the completeness of the municipal system is 
considered ! Nothing is left out. If you go into 
the markets, and the custom-houses, the insurers' 
and notaries' offices, the offices of sealers of weights 
and measures, of inspection of provisions, — it will 
appear as if one man had made it all. Wherever 
you go, a wit like your own has been before you, 
and has realized its thought. The Eleusinian 
mysteries, the Egyptian architecture, the Indian 
astronomy, the Greek sculpture, show that there 



224 ESSAY VIII. 

always were seeing and knowing men in the planet. 
The world is full of masonic ties, of guilds, of 
secret and public legions of honor ; that of schol- 
ars, for example ; and that of gentlemen fraterniz- 
ing with the upper class of every country and every 
culture. 

I am very much struck in literature by the ap- 
pearance, that one person wrote all the books ; as 
if the editor of a journal planted his body of re- 
porters in different parts of the field of action, and 
relieved some by others from time to time ; but 
there is such equality and identity both of judg- 
ment and point of view in the narrative, that it is 
plainly the work of one all-seeing, all-hearing gen- 
tleman. I looked into Pope's Odyssey yesterday : 
it is as correct and elegant after our canon of to- 
day, as if it were newly written. The modern- 
ness of all good books seems to give me an exist- 
ence as wide as man. What is well done, I feel 
as if I did ; what is ill done, I reck not of. Shak- 
speare's passages of passion (for example, in Lear 
and Hamlet) are in the very dialect of the present 
year. I am faithful again to the whole over the 
members in my use of books. I find the most 
pleasure in reading a book in a manner least flat- 
tering to the author. I read Proclus, and some- 
times Plato, as I might read a dictionary, for a me- 



NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 225 

clianical help to the fancy and the imagination. I 
read for the lustres, as if one should use a fine pic- 
ture in a chromatic experiment, for its rich colors. 
'Tis not Proclus, but a piece of nature and fate 
that I explore. It is a greater joy to see the au- 
thor's author, than himself. A higher pleasure of 
the same kind I found lately at a concert, where I 
went to hear Handel's Messiah. As the master 
overpowered the littleness and.incapableness of the 
performers, and made them conductors of his elec- 
tricity, so it was easy to observe what efforts nature 
was making through so many hoarse, wooden, and 
imperfect persons, to produce beautiful voices, fluid 
and soul-guided men and women. The genius of 
nature was paramount at the oratorio. 

This preference of the genius to the parts is the 
secret of that deification of art, which is found in 
all superior minds. Art, in the artist, is proportion, 
or, a habitual respect to the whole by an eye lov- 
ing beauty in details. And the wonder and charm 
of it is the sanity in insanity which it denotes. 
Proportion is almost impossible to human beings. 
There is no one who does not exaggerate. In con- 
versation, men are encumbered with personality, 
and talk too much. In modern sculpture, picture, 
and poetry, the beauty is miscellaneous ; the artist 
works here and there, and at all points, adding and 



226 



ESSAY VIII. 



adding, instead of unfolding the unit of his thought. 
Beautiful details we must have, or no artist : but 
they must be means, and never other. The eye 
must not lose sight for a moment of the purpose. 
Lively boys write to their ear and eye, and the 
cool reader finds nothing but sweet jingles in it. 
When they grow older, they respect the argument. 

We obey the same intellectual integrity, when 
we study in exceptions the law of the world. 
Anomalous facts, as the never quite obsolete ru- 
mors of magic and demonology, and the new alle- 
gations of phrenologists and neurologists, are of 
ideal use. They are good indications. Homoeop- 
athy is insignificant as an art of healing, but of 
great value as criticism on the hygeia or medical 
practice of the time. So with Mesmerism, Swe- 
denborgism, Fourierism, and the Millennial Church ; 
they are poor pretensions enough, but good criti- 
cism on the science, philosophy, and preaching of 
the day. For these abnormal insights of the 
adepts, ought to be normal, and things of course. 

All things show us, that on every side we are 
very near to the best. It seems not worth while 
to execute with too much pains some one intellec- 
tual, or aesthetical, or civil feat, when presently the 
dream will scatter, and we shall burst into univer- 
sal power. The reason of idleness and of crime 



NOMINALIST AND ItEALIST. 227 

is the deferring of our hopes. Whilst we are wait- 
ing, we beguile the time with jokes, with sleep, 
with eating, and with crimes. 

Thus we settle it in our cool libraries, that all 
the agents with which we deal are subalterns, 
which we can well afford to let pass, and life will 
be simpler when we live at the centre, and flout 
the surfaces. I wish to speak with all respect of 
persons, but sometimes I must pinch myself to 
keep awake, and preserve the due decorum. They 
melt so fast into each other, that they are like grass 
and trees, and it needs an effort to treat them as 
individuals. Though the uninspired man certainly 
finds persons a conveniency in household matters, 
the divine man does not respect them : he sees 
thern as a rack of clouds, or a fleet of ripples which 
the wind drives over the surface of the water. But 
this is flat rebellion. Nature will not be Buddhist : 
she resents generalizing, and insults the philosopher 
in every moment with a million of fresh particu- 
lars. It is all idle talking : as much as a man is a 
whole, so is he also a part ; and it were partial not 
to see it. What you say in your pompous distri- 
bution only distributes you into your class and sec- 
tion. You have not got rid of parts by denying 
them, but are the more partial. You are one thing, 
but nature is one thing and the other thing, in the 



228 ESSAY VIII. 

same moment. She will not remain orbed in a 
thought, but rushes into persons ; and when each 
person, inflamed to a fury of personality, would 
conquer all things to his poor crotchet, she raises 
up against him another person, and by many per- 
sons incarnates again a sort of whole. She will 
have all. Nick Bottom cannot play all the parts, 
work it how he may : there will be somebody else, 
and the world will be round. Everything must 
have its flower or effort at the beautiful, coarser or 
finer according to its stuff. They relieve and rec- 
ommend each other, and the sanity of society is a 
balance of a thousand insanities. She punishes 
abstractionists, and will only forgive an induction 
which is rare and casual. We like to come to a 
height of land and see the landscape, just as we 
value a general remark in conversation. But it is 
not the intention of nature that we should live by 
general views. We fetch fire and water, run about 
all day among the shops and markets, and get our 
clothes and shoes made and mended, and are the 
victims of these details, and once in a fortnight we 
arrive perhaps at a rational moment. If we were 
not thus infatuated, if we saw the real from hour 
to hour, we should not be here to write and to read, 
but should have been burned or frozen long ago. 
She would never get anything done, if she suffered 
admirable Crichtons, and universal geniuses. She 



NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 229 

loves better a wheelwright who dreams all night of 
wheels, and a groom who is part of his horse : for 
she is full of work, and these are her hands. As 
the frugal farmer takes care that his cattle shall eat 
down the rowen, and swine shall eat the waste of 
his house, and poultry shall pick the crumbs, so 
our economical mother despatches a new genius 
and habit of mind into every district and condition 
of existence, plants an eye wherever a new ray of 
light can fall, and gathering up into some man 
every property in the universe, establishes thou- 
sandfold occult mutual attractions among her off- 
spring, that all this wash and waste of power may 
be imparted and exchanged. 

Great dangers undoubtedly accrue from this in- 
carnation and distribution of the godhead, and 
hence nature has her maligners, as if she were 
Circe ; and Alphonso of Castile fancied he could 
have given useful advice. But she does not go 
unprovided; she has hellebore at the bottom of the 
cup. Solitude would ripen a plentiful crop of des- 
pots. The recluse thinks of men as having his 
manner, or as not having his manner ; and as hav- 
ing degrees of it, more and less. But when he 
comes into a public assembly, he sees that men 
have very different manners from his own, and in 
their way admirable. In his childhood and youth, 
he has had many checks and censures, and thinks 
20 



230 ESSAY VIII. 

modestly enough of his own endowment. When 
afterwards he comes to unfold it in propitious cir- 
cumstance, it seems the only talent : he is delighted 
with his success, and accounts himself already the 
fellow of the great. But he goes into a mob, into 
a banking house, into a mechanic's shop, into a 
mill, into a laboratory, into a ship, into a camp, and 
in each new place he is no better than an idiot : 
other talents take place, and rule the hour. The 
rotation which whirls every leaf and pebble to the 
meridian, reaches to every gift of man, and we all 
take turns at the top. 

For nature, who abhors mannerism, has set her 
heart on breaking up all styles and tricks, and it is 
so much easier to do what one has done before, 
than to do a new thing, that there is a perpetual 
tendency to a set mode. In every conversation, 
even the highest, there is a certain trick, which 
may be soon learned by an acute person, and then 
that particular style continued indefinitely. Each 
man, too, is a tyrant in tendency, because he would 
impose his idea on others; and their trick is their 
natural defence. Jesus would absorb the race ; 
but Tom Paine or the coarsest blasphemer helps 
humanity by resisting this exuberance of power. 
Hence the immense benefit of party in politics, as 
it reveals faults of character in a chief, which the 
intellectual force of the persons, with ordinary 



NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 231 

opportunity, and not hurled into aphelion by hatred, 
could not have seen. Since we are all so stupid, 
what benefit that there should be two stupidities ! 
It is like that brute advantage so essential to astron- 
omy, of having the diameter of the earth's orbit 
for a base of its triangles. Democracy is morose, 
and runs to anarchy, but in the state, and in the 
schools, it is indispensable to resist the consolida- 
tion of all men into a few men. If John was per- 
fect, why are you and I alive ? As long as any 
man exists, there is some need of him ; let him 
fight for his own. A new poet has appeared ; a 
new character approached us ; why should we re- 
fuse to eat bread, until we have found his regiment 
and section in our old army-files ? Why not a new 
man ? Here is a new enterprise of Brook Farm, of 
Skeneateles, of Northampton : why so impatient to 
baptize them Essenes, or Port-Royalists, or Shak- 
ers, or by any known and effete name ? Let it be 
a new way of living. Why have only two or three 
ways of life, and not thousands ? Every man 
is wanted, and no man is wanted much. We 
came this time for condiments, not for corn. We 
want the great genius only for joy ; for one star 
more in our constellation, for one tree more in our 
grove. But he thinks we wish to belong to him, 
as he wishes to occupy us. He greatly mistakes 
us. I think I have done well, if I have acquired a 



232 ESSAY VIII. 

new word from a good author; and my business 
with him is to find my own, though it were only 
to melt him down into an epithet or an image for 
daily use. 

"Into paint will I grind thee, my bride ! " 

To embroil the confusion, and make it impossi- 
ble to arrive at any general statement, when we 
have insisted on the imperfection of individuals, 
our affections and our experience urge that every 
individual is entitled to honor, and a very generous 
treatment is sure to be repaid. A recluse sees only 
two or three persons, and allows them all their 
room ; they spread themselves at large. The states- 
man looks at many, and compares the few habitu- 
ally with others, and these look less. Yet are 
they not entitled to this generosity of reception ? 
and is not munificence the means of insight ? For 
though gamesters say, that the cards beat all the 
players, though they were never so skilful, yet in 
the contest we are now considering, the players 
are also the game, and share the power of the 
cards. If you criticise a fine genius, the odds are 
that you are out of your reckoning, and, instead of 
the poet, are censuring your own caricature of him. 
For there is somewhat spheral and infinite in 
every man, especially in every genius, which, if 
yon can come very near him, sports with all your 



NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 233 

limitations. For, rightly, every man is a channel 
through which heaven floweth, and, whilst I fan- 
cied I was criticising him, I was censuring or 
rather terminating my own soul. After taxing 
Goethe as a courtier, artificial, unbelieving, world- 
ly, — I took up this book of Helena, and found 
him an Indian of the wilderness, a piece of pure 
nature like an apple or an oak, large as morning or 
night, and virtuous as a brier-rose. 

But care is taken that the whole tune shall be 
played. If Ave were not kept among surfaces, 
everything would be large and universal : now the 
excluded attributes burst in on us with the more 
brightness, that they have been excluded. " Your 
turn now, my turn next," is the rule of the game. 
The universality being hindered in its primary 
form, comes in the secondary form of all sides: 
the points come in succession to the meridian, and 
by the speed of rotation, a new whole is formed. 
Nature keeps herself whole, and her representation 
complete in the experience of each mind. She 
suffers no seat to be vacant in her college. It is 
the secret of the world that all things subsist, and 
do not die, but only retire a little from sight, and 
afterwards return again. Whatever does not con- 
cern us, is concealed from us. As soon as a person 
is no longer related to our present well-being, he is 
concealed, or dies, as we say. Really, all things 
20* 



234 ESSAY VIII. 

and persons are related to us, but according to our 
nature, they act on us not at once, but in succes- 
sion, and we are made aware of their presence 
one at a time. All persons, all things which we 
have known, are here present, and many more than 
we see ; the world is full. As the ancient said, the 
world is a plenum or solid ; and if we saw all 
things that really surround us, we should be impris- 
oned and unable to move. For, though nothing is 
impassable to the soul, but all things are pervious 
to it, and like highways, yet this is only whilst the 
soul does not see them. As soon as the soul sees 
any object, it stops before that object. Therefore, 
the divine Providence, which keeps the universe 
open in every direction to the soul, conceals all the 
furniture and all the persons that do not concern a 
particular soul, from the senses of that individual. 
Through solidest eternal things, the man finds his 
road, as if they did not subsist, and does not once 
suspect their being. As soon as he needs a new 
object, suddenly he beholds it, and no longer at- 
tempts to pass through it, but takes another way. 
When he has exhausted for the time the nourish- 
ment to be drawn from any one person or thing, 
that object is withdrawn from his observation, and 
though still in his immediate neighborhood, he 
does not suspect its presence. Nothing is dead : 
men feign themselves dead, and endure mock fune- 



NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 235 

rals and mournful obituaries, and there they stand 
looking out of the window, sound and well, in 
some new and strange disguise. Jesus is not dead : 
he is very well alive : nor John, nor Paul, nor Ma- 
homet, nor Aristotle ; at times we believe we have 
seen them all, and could easily tell the names un- 
der which they go. 

If we cannot make voluntary and conscious 
steps in the admirable science of universals, let us 
see the parts wisely, and infer the genius of nature 
from the best particulars with a becoming charity. 
What is best in each kind is an index of what 
should be the average of that thing. Love shows 
me the opulence of nature, by disclosing to me 
in my friend a hidden wealth, and I infer an equal 
depth of good in every other direction. It is com- 
monly said by farmers, that a good pear or apple 
costs no more time or pains to rear, than a poor one ; 
so I would have no work of art, no speech, or ac- 
tion, or thought, or friend, but the best. 

The end and the means, the gamester and the 
game, — life is made up of the intermixture and re- 
action of these two amicable powers, whose marriage 
appears beforehand monstrous, as each denies and 
tends to abolish the other. We must reconcile the 
contradictions as we can, but their discord and 
their concord introduce wild absurdities into our 
thinking and speech. No sentence will hold the 



236 ESSAY VIII. 

whole truth, and the only way in which we can be 
just, is by giving ourselves the lie ; Speech is bet- 
ter than silence ; silence is better than speech ; — 
All things are in contact ; every atom has a sphere 
of repulsion ; — Things are, and are not, at the 
same time ; — and the like. All the universe over, 
there is but one thing, this old Two-Face, creator- 
creature, mind-matter, right-wrong, of which any 
proposition may be affirmed or denied. Very fitly, 
therefore, I assert, that every man is a partialist, 
that nature secures him as an instrument by self- 
conceit, preventing the tendencies to religion and 
science ; and now further assert, that, each man's 
genius being nearly and affectionately explored, he 
is justified in his individuality, as his nature is 
found to be immense ; and now I add, that every 
man is a universalist also, and, as our earth, whilst 
it spins on its own axis, spins all the time around the 
sun through the celestial spaces, so the least of its 
rational children, the most dedicated to his private 
affair, works out, though as it were under a dis- 
guise, the universal problem. We fancy men are 
individuals ; so are pumpkins ; but every pumpkin 
in the field, goes through every point of pumpkin 
history. The rabid democrat, as soon as he is sen- 
ator and rich man, has ripened beyond possibility 
of sincere radicalism, and unless he can resist the 
sun, he must be conservative the remainder of his 



NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 237 

days. Lord Eldon said in his old age, " that, if he 
were to begin life again, he would be damned but 
he would begin as agitator." 

We hide this universality, if we can, but it ap- 
pears at all points. We are as ungrateful as chil- 
dren. There is nothing we cherish and strive to 
draw to us, but in some hour we turn and rend it. 
We keep a running fire of sarcasm at ignorance and 
the life of the senses ; then goes by, perchance, a 
fair girl, a piece of life, gay and happy, and mak- 
ing the commonest offices beautiful, by the energy 
and heart with which she does them, and seeing this, 
we admire and love her and them, and say, ' Lo ! a 
genuine creature of the fair earth, not dissipated, or 
too early ripened by books, philosophy, religion, so- 
ciety, or care ! ' insinuating a treachery and con- 
tempt for all we had so long loved and wrought in 
ourselves and others. 

If we could have any security against moods ! 
If the profoundest prophet could be holden to his 
words, and the hearer who is ready to sell all and 
join the crusade, could have any certificate that 
to-morrow his prophet shall not unsay his testi- 
mony ! But the Truth sits veiled there on the 
Bench, and never interposes an adamantine syl- 
lable ; and the most sincere and revolutionary doc- 
trine, put as if the ark of God were carried forward 
some furlongs, and planted there for the succor of 



238 ESSAY VIII. 

the world, shall in a few weeks be coldly set aside 
by the same speaker, as morbid ; " I thought I was 
right, but I was not," — and the same immeasu- 
rable credulity demanded for new audacities. If 
we were not of all opinions ! if we did not in any 
moment shift the platform on which we stand, and 
look and speak from another! if there could be any 
regulation, any ' one-hour-rule,' that a man should 
never leave his point of view, without sound of 
trumpet. I am always insincere, as always know- 
ing there are other moods. 

How sincere and confidential we can be, saying 
all that lies in the mind, and yet go away feeling 
that all is yet unsaid, from the incapacity of the 
parties to know each other, although they use the 
same words ! My companion assumes to know my 
mood and habit of thought, and "we go on from 
explanation to explanation, until all is said which 
words can, and we leave matters just as they were 
at first, because of that vicious assumption. Is it 
that every man believes every other to be an in- 
curable partialist, and himself a universalist ? I 
talked yesterday with a pair of philosophers : I 
endeavored to show my good men that I love 
everything by turns, and nothing long ; that I 
loved the centre, but doated on the superficies ; 
that I loved man, if men seemed to me mice and 
rats ; that I revered saints, but woke up glad that 



NOMINALIST AND REALIST. 239 

the old pagan world stood its ground, and died 
hard ; that I was glad of men of every gift and 
nobility, but would not live in their arms. Could 
they but once understand, that I loved to know 
that they existed, and heartily wished them God- 
speed, yet, out of my poverty of life and thought, 
had no word or welcome for them when they came 
to see me, and could well consent to their living 
in Oregon, for any claim I felt on them, it would 
be a great satisfaction. 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS 



In the suburb, in the town, 
On the railway, in the square, 
Came a beam of goodness down 
Doubling daylight everywhere : 
Peace now each for malice takes, 
Beauty for his sinful weeds, 
For the angel Hope aye makes 
Him an angel whom she leads. 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 



A LECTURE READ BEFORE THE SOCIETY IX AMORY HALE, ON 
SUNDAY, 3 MARCH, 1844. 



Whoever has had opportunity of acquaintance 
with society in New England, during the last twen- 
ty-five' years, with those middle and with those 
leading sections that may constitute any just rep- 
resentation of the character and aim of the com- 
munity, will have been struck with the great ac- 
tivity of thought and experimenting. His atten- 
tion must be commanded by the signs that the 
Church, or religious party, is falling from the 
church nominal, and is appearing in temperance 
and non-resistance societies, in movements of abo- 
litionists and of socialists, and in very significant 
assemblies, called Sabbath and Bible Conventions, 
— composed of ultraists, of seekers, of all the soul 
of the soldiery of dissent, and meeting to call in 
question the authority of the Sabbath, of the 
priesthood, and of the church. In these move- 
ments, nothing was more remarkable than the dis- 



244 LECTURE AT AMORY HALL. 

content they begot in the movers. The spirit of 
protest and of detachment, drove the members of 
these Conventions to bear testimony against the 
church, and immediately afterward, to declare their 
discontent with these Conventions, their independ- 
ence of their colleagues, and their impatience of 
the methods whereby they were working. They 
defied each other, like a congress of kings, each of 
whom had a realm to rule, and a way of his own 
that made concert unprofitable. What a fertility 
of projects for the salvation of the world ! One 
apostle thought all men should go to farming ; and 
another, that no man should buy or sell ; that the 
use of money was the cardinal evil ; another, that 
the mischief was in our diet, that we eat and drink 
damnation. These made unleavened bread, and 
were foes to the death to fermentation. It was in 
vain urged by the housewife, that God made yeast, 
as well as dough, and loves fermentation just as 
dearly as he loves vegetation ; that fermentation 
develops the saccharine element in the grain, and 
makes it more palatable and more digestible. No ; 
they wish the pure wheat, and will die but it shall 
not ferment. Stop, dear nature, these incessant 
advances of thine ; let us scotch these ever-rolling 
wheels ! Others attacked the system of agriculture, 
the use of animal manures in farming ; and the 
tyranny of man over brute nature ; these abuses 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 245 

polluted his food. The ox must be taken from the 
plough, and the horse from the cart, the hundred 
acres of the farm must be spaded, and the man 
must walk wherever boats and locomotives will not 
carry him. Even the insect world was to be de- 
fended, — that had been too long neglected, and a 
society for the protection of ground-worms, slugs, 
and mosquitos was to be incorporated without de- 
lay. With these appeared the adepts of homoeop- 
athy, of hydropathy, of mesmerism, of phrenolo- 
gy, and their wonderful theories of the Christian 
miracles ! Others assailed particular vocations, as 
that of the lawyer, that of the merchant, of the 
manufacturer, of the clergyman, of the scholar. 
Others attacked the institution of marriage, as the 
fountain of social evils. Others devoted them- 
selves to the worrying of churches and meetings 
for public worship ; and the fertile forms of anti- 
nomianism among the elder puritans, seemed to 
have their match in the plenty of the new harvest 
of reform. 

With this din of opinion and debate, there was 
a keener scrutiny of institutions and domestic life 
than any we had known, there was sincere protest- 
ing against existing evils, and there were changes 
of employment dictated by conscience. No doubt, 
there was plentiful vaporing, and cases of backslid- 
ing might occur. But in each of these movements 
21 



246 LECTURE AT AMORY HALL. 

emerged a good result, a tendency to the adoption 
of simpler methods, and an assertion of the suffi- 
ciency of the private man. Thus it was directly 
in the spirit and genius of the age, what happened 
in one instance, when a church censured and 
threatened to excommunicate one of its members, 
on account of the somewhat hostile part to the 
church, which his conscience led him to take in 
the anti-slavery business ; the threatened individual 
immediately excommunicated the church in a pub- 
lic and formal process. This has been several times 
repeated : it was excellent when it was done the 
first time, but, of course, loses all value when it is 
copied. Every project in the history of reform, 
no matter how violent and surprising, is good, when 
it is the dictate of a man's genius and constitution, 
but very dull and suspicious when adopted from 
another. It is right and beautiful in any man to 
say, 'I will take this coat, or this book, or this 
measure of corn of yours,' — in whom we see the 
act to be original, and to flow from the whole spirit 
and faith of him ; for then that taking will have a 
giving as free and divine : but we are very easily 
disposed to resist the same generosity of speech, 
when we miss originality and truth to character 
in it. 

There was in all the practical activities of New 
England, for the last quarter of a century, a gradual 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 247 

withdrawal of tender consciences from the social 
organizations. There is observable throughout, 
the contest between mechanical and spiritual meth- 
ods, but with a steady tendency of the thoughtful 
and virtuous to a deeper belief and reliance on spir- 
itual facts. 

In politics, for example, it is easy to see the 
progress of dissent. The country is full of rebel- 
lion; the country is full of kings. Hands off! let 
there be no control and no interference in the ad- 
ministration of the affairs of this kingdom of me. 
Hence the growth of the doctrine and of the party 
of Free Trade, and the willingness to try that 
experiment, in the face of what appear incontesta- 
ble facts. I confess, the motto of the Globe news- 
paper is so attractive to me, that I can seldom find 
much appetite to read what is below it in its col- 
umns, " The world is governed too much." So 
the country is frequently affording solitary exam- 
ples of resistance to the government, solitary nulli- 
fiers, who throw themselves on their reserved 
rights ; nay, who have reserved all their rights ; 
who reply to the assessor, and to the clerk of court, 
that they do not know the State ; and embarrass 
the courts of law, by non-juring, and the com- 
mander-in-chief of the militia, by non-resistance. 

The same disposition to scrutiny and dissent 
appeared in civil, festive, neighborly, and domestic 



248 LECTURE AT AM0RY HALL. 

society. A restless, prying, conscientious criticism 
broke out in unexpected quarters. Who gave me 
the money with which I bought my coat ? Why 
should professional labor and that of the counting- 
house be paid so disproportionately to the labor of 
the porter, and woodsawyer ? This whole business 
of Trade gives me to pause and think, as it consti- 
tutes false relations between men ; inasmuch as I 
am prone to count myself relieved of any responsi- 
bility to behave well and nobly to that person 
whom I pay with money, whereas if I had not 
that commodity, I should be put on my good 
behavior in all companies, and man would be a 
benefactor to man, as being himself his only certifi- 
cate that he had a right to those aids and services 
which each asked of the other. Am I not too pro- 
tected a person ? is there not a wide disparity be- 
tween the lot of me and the lot of thee, my poor 
brother, my poor sister? Am I not defrauded of 
my best culture in the loss of those gymnastics 
which manual labor and the emergencies of poverty 
constitute ? I find nothing healthful or exalting in 
the smooth conventions of society ; I do not like 
the close air of saloons. I begin to suspect myself 
to be a prisoner, though treated with all this cour- 
tesy and luxury. I pay a destructive tax in my 
conformity. 

The same insatiable criticism may be traced in 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 249 

the efforts for the reform of Education. The 
popular education has been taxed with a want of 
truth and nature. It was complained that an edu- 
cation to things was not given. We are students 
of words : we are shut up in schools, and colleges; 
and recitation-rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and 
come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of 
words, and do not know a thing. We cannot use 
our hands, or our legs, or our eyes, or our arms. 
We do not know an edible root in the woods, we 
cannot tell our course by the stars, nor the hour of 
the day by the sun. It is well if we can swim and 
skate. We are afraid of a horse, of a cow, of a dog, 
of a snake, of a spider. The Roman rule was, to 
teach a boy nothing that he could not learn stand- 
ing. The old English rule was, ' All summer in 
the field, and all winter in the study.' And it seems 
as if a man should learn to plant, or to fish, or to 
hunt, that he might secure his subsistence at all 
events, and not be painful to his friends and fellow- 
men. The lessons of science should be experi- 
mental also. The sight of the planet through a 
telescope, is worth all the course on astronomy : 
the shock of the electric spark in the elbow, out- 
values all the theories ; the taste of the nitrous 
oxide, the firing of an artificial volcano, are better 
than volumes of chemistry. 

One of the traits of the new spirit, is the inqui- 



250 LECTURE AT AMORY HALL. 

sition it fixed on our scholastic devotion to the dead 
languages. The ancient languages, with great 
beauty of structure, contain wonderful remains of 
genius, which draw, and always will draw, certain 
likeminded men, — Greek men, and Roman men, 
in all countries, to their study ; but by a wonderful 
drowsiness of usage, they had exacted the study of 
all men. Once (say two centuries ago), Latin 
and Greek had a strict relation to all the science and 
culture there was in Europe, and the Mathematics 
had a momentary importance at some era of activity 
in physical science. These things became stereo- 
typed as education, as the manner of men is. But the 
Good Spirit never cared for the colleges, and though 
all men and boys were now drilled in Latin, Greek, 
and Mathematics, it had quite left these shells high 
and dry on the beach, and was now creating and feed- 
ing other matters at other ends of the world. But 
in a hundred high schools and colleges, this warfare 
against common sense still goes on. Four, or six, 
or ten years, the pupil is parsing Greek and Latin, 
and as soon as he leaves the University, as it is ludi- 
crously styled, he shuts those books for the last 
time. Some thousands of young men are graduated 
at our colleges in this country every year, and the 
persons who, at forty years, still read Greek, can all 
be counted on your hand. I never met with ten. 
Four or five persons I have seen who read Plato. 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 251 

Bat is not this absurd, that the whole liberal 
talent of this country should be directed in its 
best years on studies which lead to nothing ? What 
was the consequence ? Some intelligent persons 
said or thought ; ' Is that Greek and Latin some 
spell to conjure with, and not words of reason ? If 
the physician, the lawyer, the divine, never use it 
to come at their ends, I need never learn it to come 
at mine. Conjuring is gone out of fashion, and I 
will omit this conjugating, and go straight to af- 
fairs.' So they jumped the Greek and Latin, and 
read law, medicine, or sermons, without it. To 
the astonishment of all, the self-made men took 
even ground at once with the oldest of the regular 
graduates, and in a few months the most conserva- 
tive circles of Boston and New York had quite 
forgotten who of their gownsmen was college- 
bred, and who was not. 

One tendency appears alike in the philosophical 
speculation, and in the rudest democratical move- 
ments, through all the petulance and all the pue- 
rility, the wish, namely, to cast aside the super- 
fluous, and arrive at short methods, urged, as I 
suppose, by an intuition that the human spirit is 
equal to all emergencies, alone, and that man is 
more often injured than helped by the means he 
uses. 

I conceive this gradual casting off of material 



252 LECTURE AT AMORY HALL. 

aids, and the indication of growing trust in the 
private, self-supplied powers of the individual, to 
be the affirmative principle of the recent philos- 
ophy : and that it is feeling its own profound truth, 
and is reaching forward at this very hour to the 
happiest conclusions. I readily concede that in 
this, as in every period of intellectual activity, 
there has been a noise of denial and protest ; much 
was to be resisted, much was to be got rid of by 
those who were reared in the old, before they could 
begin to affirm and to construct. Many a reformer 
perishes in his removal of rubbish, — and that 
makes the offensiveness of the class. They are 
partial ; they are not equal to the work they pre- 
tend. They lose their way ; in the assault on the 
kingdom of darkness, they expend all their energy 
on some accidental evil, and lose their sanity and 
power of benefit. It is of little moment that one or 
two, or twenty errors of our social system be cor- 
rected, but of much that the man be in his senses. 

The criticism and attack on institutions which 
we have witnessed, has made one thing plain, that 
society gains nothing whilst a man, not himself 
renovated, attempts to renovate things around him : 
he has become tediously good in some particular, 
but negligent or narrow in the rest ; and. hypocrisy 
and vanity are often the disgusting result. 

It is handsomer to remain in the establishment 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 253 

better than the establishment, and conduct that 
in the best manner, than to make a sally against 
evil by some single improvement, without sup- 
porting it by a total regeneration. Do not be so 
vain of your one objection. Do you think there 
is only one ? Alas ! my good friend, there is no 
part of society or of life better than any other 
part. All our things are right and wrong to- 
gether. The wave of evil washes all our insti- 
tutions alike. Do you complain of our Marriage ? 
Our marriage is no worse than our education, our 
diet, our trade, our social customs. Do you complain 
of the laws of Property ? It is a pedantry to give 
such importance to them. Can we not play the game 
of life with these counters, as well as with those ; 
in the institution of property, as well as out of it. 
Let into it the new and renewing principle of love, 
and property will be universality. No one gives 
the impression of superiority to the institution, 
which he must give who will reform it. It makes 
no difference what you say : you must make me 
feel that you are aloof from it ; by your natural 
and supernatural advantages, do easily see to the 
end of it, — do see how man can do without it. 
Now all men are on one side. No man deserves 
to be heard against property. Only Love, only an 
Idea, is against property, as we hold it. 

I cannot afford to be irritable and captious, nor 
22 



254 LECTURE AT AMORY HALL. 

to waste all my time in attacks. If I should go 
out of church whenever I hear a false sentiment, 
I could never stay there five minutes. But why 
come out ? the street is as false as the church, and 
when I get to my house, or to my manners, or 
to my speech, I have not got away from the lie. 
When we see an eager assailant of one of these 
wrongs, a special reformer, we feel like asking him, 
What right have you, sir, to your one virtue? Is 
virtue piecemeal? This is a jewel amidst the rags 
of a beggar. 

In another way the right will be vindicated. In 
the midst of abuses, in the heart of cities, in the 
aisles of false churches, alike in one place and in 
another, — wherever, namely, a just and heroic soul 
finds itself, there it will do what is next at hand, 
and by the new quality of character it shall put 
forth, it shall abrogate that old condition, law or 
school in which it stands, before the law of its 
own mind. 

If partiality was one fault of the movement par- 
ty, the other defect was their reliance on Associa- 
tion. Doubts such as those I have intimated, 
drove many good persons to agitate the questions of 
social reform. But the revolt against the spirit of 
commerce, the spirit of aristocracy, and the invet- 
erate abuses of cities, did not appear possible to 
individuals ; and to do battle against numbers, they 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 255 

armed themselves with numbers, and against con- 
cert, they relied on new concert. 

Following, or advancing beyond the ideas of 
St. Simon, of Fourier, and of Owen, three com- 
munities have already been formed in Massachusetts 
on kindred plans, and many more in the country 
at large. They aim to give every member a share 
in the manual labor, to give an equal reward to 
labor and to talent, and to unite a liberal culture 
with an education to labor. The scheme offers, 
by the economies of associated labor and expense, 
to make every member rich, on the same amount 
of property, that, in separate families, would leave 
every member poor. These new associations are 
composed of men and women of superior talents 
and sentiments : yet it may easily be questioned, 
whether such a community will draw, except in 
its beginnings, the able and the good ; whether 
those who have energy, will not prefer their chance 
of superiority and power in the world, to the hum- 
ble certainties of the association ; whether such a 
retreat does not promise to become an asylum to 
those who have tried and failed, rather than a field 
to the strong; and whether the members will not 
necessarily be fractions of men, because each finds 
that he cannot enter it, without some compromise. 
Friendship and association are very fine things, 
and a grand phalanx of the best of the human 



256 LECTURE AT AMORY HALL. 

race, banded for some catholic object : yes, excel- 
lent ; but remember that no society can ever be so 
large as one man. He in his friendship, in his 
natural and momentary associations, doubles or 
multiplies himself ; but in the hour in which he 
mortgages himself to two or ten or twenty, he dwarfs 
himself below the stature of one. 

But the men of less faith could not thus believe, 
and to such, concert appears the sole specific of 
strength. I have failed, and you have failed, but 
perhaps together we shall not fail. Our housekeep- 
ing is not satisfactory to us, but perhaps a phalanx, 
a community, might be. Many of us have differed 
in opinion, and we could find no man who could 
make the truth plain, but possibly a college, or an 
ecclesiastical council might. I have not been able 
either to persuade my brother or to prevail on my- 
self, to disuse the traffic or the potation of brandy, 
but perhaps a pledge of total abstinence might 
effectually restrain us. The candidate my party 
votes for is not to be trusted with a dollar, but he 
will be honest in the Senate, for we can bring pub- 
lic opinion to bear on him. Thus concert was the 
specific in all cases. But concert is neither better 
nor worse, neither more nor less potent than indi- 
vidual force. All the men in the world cannot 
make a statue walk and speak, cannot make a drop 
of blood, or a blade of grass, any more than one 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 257 

man can. But let there be one man, let there be 
truth in two men, in ten men, then is concert for 
the. first time possible, because the force which 
moves the world is a new quality, and can never 
be furnished by adding whatever quantities of a 
different kind. What is the use of the concert of 
the false and the disunited ? There can be no con- 
cert in two, where there is no concert in one. 
When the individual is not individual, but is dual ; 
when his thoughts look one way, and his actions 
another ; when his faith is traversed by his habits ; 
when his will, enlightened by reason, is warped by 
his sense ; when with one hand he rows, and with 
the other backs water, what concert can be ? 

I do not wonder at the interest these projects 
inspire. The world is awaking to the idea of 
union, and these experiments show what it is think- 
ing of. It is and will be magic. Men will live 
and communicate, and plough, and reap, and gov- 
ern, as by added ethereal power, when once they 
are united ; as in a celebrated experiment, by ex- 
piration and respiration exactly together, four per- 
sons lift a heavy man from the ground by the little 
finger only, and without sense of weight. But this 
union must be inward, and not one of covenants, 
and is to be reached by a reverse of the methods they 
use. The union is only perfect, when all the uniters 
are isolated. It is the union of friends who live in 
22 



258 LECTURE AT AMORY HALL. 

different streets or towns. Each man, if he attempts 
to join himself to others, is on all sides cramped 
and diminished of his proportion ; and the stricter 
the union, the smaller and the more pitiful he is. 
But leave him alone, to recognize in every hour 
and place the secret soul, he will go up and down 
doing the works of a true member, and, to the 
astonishment of all, the work will be done with 
concert, though no man spoke. Government will 
be adamantine without any governor. The union 
must be ideal in actual individualism. 

I pass to the indication in some particulars of 
that faith in man, which the heart is preaching to 
us in these days, and which engages the more re- 
gard, from the consideration, that the speculations 
of one generation are the history of the next fol- 
lowing. 

In alluding just now to our system of education, 
I spoke of the deadness of its details. But it is 
open to graver criticism than the palsy of its mem- 
bers : it is a system of despair. The disease with 
which the human mind now labors, is want of faith. 
Men do not believe in a power of education. We 
do not think we can speak to divine sentiments in 
man, and we do not try. We renounce all high 
aims. We believe that the defects of so many per- 
verse and so many frivolous people, who make up 
society, are organic, and society is a hospital of 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 259 

incurables. A man of good sense but of little 
faith, whose compassion seemed to lead him to 
church as often as he went there, said to me ; 
" that he liked to have concerts, and fairs, and 
churches, and other public amusements go on." 
I am afraid the remark is too honest, and comes 
from the same origin as the maxim of the tyrant, 
" If you would rule the world quietly, you must 
keep it amused." I notice too, that the ground 
on which eminent public servants urge the claims 
of popular education is fear : ' This country is 
filling up with thousands and millions of voters, 
and 3^011 must educate them to keep them from our 
throats.' We do not believe that any education, 
any system of philosophy, any influence of genius, 
will ever give depth of insight to a superficial mind. 
Having settled ourselves into this infidelity, our 
skill is expended to procure alleviations, diversion, 
opiates. We adorn the victim with manual skill, 
his tongue with languages, his body with inoffen- 
sive and comely manners. So have we cunningly 
hid the tragedy of limitation and inner death we 
cannot avert. Is it strange that society should 
be devoured by a secret melancholy, which breaks 
through all its smiles, and all its gayety and games? 
But even one step farther our infidelity has gone. 
It appears that some doubt is felt by good and wise 
men, whether really the happiness and probity of 



260 LECTURE AT AMORY HALL. 

men is increased by the culture of the mind in 
those disciplines to which we give the name of educa- 
tion. Unhappily, too, the doubt comes from schol- 
ars, from persons who have tried these methods. 
In their experience, the scholar was not raised by 
the sacred thoughts amongst which he dwelt, but 
used them to selfish ends. He was a profane per- 
son, and became a showman, turning his gifts to a 
marketable use, and not to his own sustenance and 
growth. It was found that the intellect could be 
independently developed, that is, in separation from 
the man, as any single organ can be invigorated, 
and the result was monstrous. A canine appetite for 
knowledge was generated, which must still be fed, 
but was never satisfied, and this knowledge not be- 
ing directed on action, never took the character of 
substantial, humane truth, blessing those whom it 
entered. It gave the scholar certain powers of 
expression, the power of speech, the power of 
poetry, of literary art, but it did not bring him to 
peace, or to beneficence. 

When the literary class betray a destitution of 
faith, it is not strange that society should be dis- 
heartened and sensualized by unbelief. What rem- 
edy ? Life must be lived on a higher plane. We 
must go up to a higher platform, to which we are 
always invited to ascend ; there, the whole aspect 
of things changes. I resist the skepticism of our 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 261 

education; and of our educated men. I do not be- 
lieve that the differences of opinion and character 
in men are organic. I do not recognize, beside the 
class of the good and the wise, a permanent class of 
skeptics, or a class of conservatives, or of malig- 
nants, or of materialists. I do not believe in two 
classes. You remember the story of the poor wo- 
man who importuned King Philip of Macedon to 
grant her justice, which Philip refused : the woman 
exclaimed, " I appeal : " the king, astonished, asked 
to whom she appealed : the woman replied, " from 
Philip drunk to Philip sober." The text will suit 
me very well. I believe not in two classes of men, 
but in man in two moods, in Philip drunk and Philip 
sober. I think, according to the good-hearted word 
of Plato, " Unwillingly the soul is deprived of 
truth." Iron conservative, miser, or thief, no man 
is, but by a supposed necessity, which he tolerates 
by shortness or torpidity of sight. The soul lets 
no man go without some visitations and holydays 
of a diviner presence. It would be easy to show, 
by a narrow scanning of any man's biography, that 
we are not so wedded to our paltry performances 
of every kind, but that every man has at intervals 
the grace to scorn his performances, in comparing 
them with his belief of what he should do, that he 
puts himself on the side of his enemies, listening 
gladly to what they say of him, and accusing him- 
self of the same things. 



262 LECTURE AT AMORY HALL. 

What is it men love in Genius, but its infinite 
hope, which degrades all it has done ? Genius 
counts all its miracles poor and short. Its own 
idea it never executed. The Iliad, the Hamlet, 
the Doric column, the Roman arch, the Gothic 
minster, the German anthem, when they are ended, 
the master casts behind him. How sinks the song 
in the waves of melody which the universe pours 
over his soul ! Before that gracious Infinite, out 
of which he drew these few strokes, how mean they 
look, though the praises of the world attend them. 
From the triumphs of his art, he turns with desire 
to this greater defeat. Let those admire who will. 
With silent joy he sees himself to be capable of a 
beauty that eclipses all which his hands have done, 
all which human hands have ever done. 

Well, we are all the children of genius, the chil- 
dren of virtue, — and feel their inspirations in our 
happier hours. Is not every man sometimes a 
radical in politics ? Men are conservatives when 
they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxu- 
rious. They are conservatives after dinner, or be- 
fore taking their rest ; when they are sick, or aged : 
in the morning, or when their intellect or their con- 
science have been aroused, when they hear music, 
or when they read poetry, they are radicals. In 
the circle of the rankest tories that could be col- 
lected in England, Old or New, let a powerful and 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 263 

stimulating intellect, a man of great heart and mind, 
act on them, and very quickly these frozen conser- 
vators will yield to the friendly influence, these 
hopeless will begin to hope, these haters will begin 
to love, these immovable statues will begin to spin 
and revolve. I cannot help recalling the fine anec- 
dote which Warton relates of Bishop Berkeley, 
when he was preparing to leave England, with his 
plan of planting the gospel among the American 
savages. " Lord Bathurst told me, that the mem- 
bers of the Scriblerus club, being met at his house 
at dinner, they agreed to rally Berkeley, who was 
also his guest, on his scheme at Bermudas. Berke- 
ley, having listened to the many lively things they 
had to say, begged to be heard in his turn, and 
displayed his plan with such an astonishing and 
animating force of eloquence and enthusiasm, that 
they were struck dumb, and, after some pause, rose 
up all together with earnestness, exclaiming, 'Let 
us set out with him immediately.' " Men in all 
ways are better than they seem. They like flat- 
tery for the moment, but they know the truth for 
their own. It is a foolish cowardice which keeps 
us from trusting them, and speaking to them rude 
truth. They resent your honesty for an instant, 
they will thank you for it always. What is it we 
heartily wish of each other? Is it to be pleased 
and flattered? No, but to be convicted and ex- 



264 LECTURE AT AMORY HALL. 

posed, to be shamed out of our nonsense of all 
kinds, and made men of, instead of ghosts and 
phantoms. We are weary of gliding ghostlike 
through the world, which is itself so slight and 
unreal. We crave a sense of reality, though it 
come in strokes of pain. I explain so, — by this 
manlike love of truth, — those excesses and errors 
into which souls of great vigor, but not equal in- 
sight, often fall. They feel the poverty at the 
bottom of all the seeming affluence of the world. 
They know the speed with which they come 
straight through the thin masquerade, and conceive 
a disgust at the indigence of nature : Rousseau, 
Mirabeau, Charles Fox, Napoleon, Byron, — and I 
could easily add names nearer home, of raging 
riders, who drive their steeds so hard, in the vio- 
lence of living to forget its illusion : they would 
know the worst, and tread the floors of hell. The 
heroes of ancient and modern fame, Cimon, The- 
mistocles, Alcibiades, Alexander, Caesar, have treated 
life and fortune as a game to be well and skilfully 
played, but the stake not to be so valued, but that 
any time, it could be held as a trifle light as air, 
and thrown up. Cassar, just before the battle of 
Pharsalia, discourses with the Egyptian priest, con- 
cerning the fountains of the Nile, and offers to quit 
the army, the empire, and Cleopatra, if he will show 
him those mysterious sources. 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 265 

The same magnanimity shows itself in our 
social relations, in the preference, namely, which 
each man gives to the society of superiors over that 
of his equals. All that a man has, will he give for 
right relations with his mates. All that he has, 
will he give for an erect demeanor in every com- 
pany and on each occasion. He aims at such 
things as his neighbors prize, and gives his days 
and nights, his talents and his heart, to strike a 
good stroke, to acquit himself in all men's sight as 
a man. The consideration of an eminent citizen, 
of a noted merchant, of a man of mark in his pro- 
fession ; naval and military honor, a general's com- 
mission, a marshal's baton, a ducal coronet, the 
laurel of poets, and, anyhow procured, the acknowl- 
edgment of eminent merit, have this lustre for each 
candidate, that they enable him to walk erect and 
unashamed, in the presence of some persons, before 
whom he felt himself inferior. Having raised him- 
self to this rank, having established his equality 
with class after class, of those with whom he would 
live well, he still finds certain others, before whom 
he cannot possess himself, because they have some- 
what fairer, somewhat grander, somewhat purer, 
which extorts homage of him. Is his ambition 
pure ? then, will his laurels and his possessions 
seem worthless : instead of avoiding these men who 
make his fine gold dim, he will cast all behind him, 
23 



266 LECTURE AT AMORY HALL. 

and seek their society only, woo and embrace this 
his humiliation and mortification, until he shall 
know why his eye sinks, his voice is husky, and 
his brilliant talents are paralyzed in this presence. 
He is sure that the soul which gives the lie to all 
things, will tell none. His constitution will not 
mislead him. If it cannot carry itself as it ought, 
high and unmatchable in the presence of any man, 
if the secret oracles whose whisper makes the sweet- 
ness and dignity of his life, do here withdraw and 
accompany him no longer; it is time to undervalue 
what he has valued, to dispossess himself of what 
he has acquired, and with Cassar to take in his hand 
the army, the empire, and Cleopatra, and say, " All 
these will I relinquish, if you will show me the 
fountains of the Nile." Dear to us are those who 
love us ; the swift moments we spend with them 
are a compensation for a great deal of misery ; they 
enlarge our life ; — but dearer are those who reject 
us as unworthy, for they add another life : they 
build a heaven before us, whereof we had not 
dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out 
of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and 
unattempted performances. 

As every man at heart wishes the best and not 
inferior society, wishes to be convicted of his error, 
and to come to himself, so he wishes that the same 
healing should not stop in his thought, but should 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 267 

penetrate his will or active power. The selfish 
man suffers more from his selfishness, than he from 
whom that selfishness withholds some important 
benefit. What he most wishes is to be lifted to 
some higher platform, that he may see beyond his 
present fear the transalpine good, so that his fear, 
his coldness, his custom may be. broken up like 
fragments of ice, melted and carried away in the 
great stream of good will. Do you ask my aid ? 
I also wish to be a benefactor. I wish more to be 
a benefactor and servant, than you wish to be served 
by me, and surely the greatest good fortune that 
could befall me, is precisely to be so moved by you 
that I should say, l Take me and all mine, and use 
me and mine freely to^your ends ' ! for, I could not 
say it, otherwise than because a great enlargement 
had come to my heart and mind, which made me 
superior to my fortunes. Here we are paralyzed 
with fear ; we hold on to our little properties, house 
and land, office and money, for the bread which 
they have in our experience yielded us, although 
we confess, that our being does not flow through 
them. We desire to be made great, we desire to 
be touched with that fire which shall command 
this ice to stream, and make our existence a bene- 
fit. If therefore we start objections to your pro- 
ject, O friend of the slave, or friend of the poor, or 
of the race, understand well, that it is because we 



268 LECTURE AT AMORY HALL. 

wish to drive you to drive us into your measures. 
We wish to hear ourselves confuted. We are 
haunted with a belief that you have a secret, which 
it would highliest advantage us to learn, and we 
would force you to impart it to us, though it should 
bring us to prison, or to worse extremity. 

Nothing shall warp me from the belief, that every 
man is a lover of truth. There is no pure lie, no 
pure malignity in nature. The entertainment of 
the proposition of depravity is the last profligacy 
and profanation. There is no skepticism, no athe- 
ism but that. Could it be received into common 
belief, suicide would unpeople the planet. It has 
had a name to live in some dogmatic theology, but 
each man's innocence and his real liking of his 
neighbor, have kept it a dead letter. I remember 
standing at the polls one day, when the anger of 
the political contest gave a certain grimness to the 
faces of the independent electors, and a good man 
at my side looking on the people, remarked, " I am 
satisfied that the largest part of these men, on either 
side, mean to vote right." I suppose, considerate 
observers looking at the masses of men, in their 
blameless, and in their equivocal actions, will assent, 
that in spite of selfishness and frivolitjr, the gen- 
eral purpose in the great number of persons is fidel- 
ity. The reason why any one refuses his assent to 
your opinion, or his aid to your benevolent design, 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 269 

is in you : he refuses to accept you as a bringer of 
truth, because, though you think you have it, he 
feels that you have it not. You have not given 
him the authentic sign. 

If it were worth while to run into details this 
general doctrine of the latent but ever soliciting 
Spirit, it would be easy to adduce illustration in 
particulars of a man's equality to the church, of 
his equality to the state, and of his equality to 
every other man. It is yet in all men's memory, 
that, a few years ago, the liberal churches com- 
plained, that the Calvinistic church denied to them 
the name of Christian. I think the complaint was 
confession : a religious church would not complain. 
A religious man like Behmen, Fox, or Sweden- 
borg, is not irritated by wanting the sanction of the 
church, but the church feels the accusation of his 
presence and belief. 

It only needs, that a just man should walk in 
our streets, to make it appear how pitiful and inar- 
tificial a contrivance is our legislation. The man 
whose part is taken, and who does not wait for 
society in anything, has a power which society 
cannot choose but feel. The familiar experiment, 
called the hydrostatic paradox, in which a capillary 
column of water balances the ocean, is a symbol 
of the relation of one man to the whole family of 
men. The wise Dandamis, on hearing the lives 
23* 



270 LECTURE AT AMORY HALL. 

of Socrates, Pythagoras, and Diogenes read, 
"judged them to be great men every way, except- 
ing, that they were too much subjected to the rev- 
erence of the laws, which to second and authorize, 
true virtue must abate very much of its original 
vigor." 

And as a man is equal to the church, and equal 
to the state, so he is equal to every other man. 
The disparities of power in men are superficial ; 
and all frank and searching conversation, in which 
a man lays himself open to his brother, apprizes 
each of their radical unity. When two persons sit 
and converse in a, thoroughly good understanding, 
the remark is sure to be made, See how we have 
disputed about words ! Let a clear, apprehensive 
mind, such as every man knows among his friends, 
converse with the most commanding poetic genius, 
I think, it would appear that there was no inequal- 
ity such as men fancy between them ; that a per- 
fect understanding, a like receiving, a like perceiv- 
ing, abolished differences, and the poet would con- 
fess, that his creative imagination gave him no deep 
advantage, but only the superficial one, that he 
could express himself, and the other could not ; 
that his advantage was a knack, which might im- 
pose on indolent men, but could not impose on lov- 
ers of truth ; for they know the tax of talent, or, 
what a price of greatness the power of expression 



NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 271 

too often pays. I believe it is the conviction of 
the purest men, that the net amount of man and 
man does not much vary. Each is incomparably 
superior to his companion in some faculty. His 
want of skill in other directions, has added to his 
fitness for his own work. Each seems to have 
some compensation yielded to him by his infirmity, 
and every hinderance operates as a concentration of 
his force. 

These and the like experiences intimate, that 
man stands in strict connection with a higher fact 
never yet manifested. There is power over and 
behind us, and we are the channels of its commu- 
nications. We seek to say thus and so, and over 
our head some spirit sits, which contradicts what 
we say. We would persuade our fellow to this 
or that ; another self within our eyes dissuades 
him. That which we keep back, this reveals. In 
vain we compose our faces and our words ; it holds 
uncontrollable communication with the enemy, and 
he answers civilly to us, but believes the spirit. 
We exclaim, ' There's a traitor in the house ! ' but 
at last it appears that he is the true man, and I am 
the traitor. This open channel to the highest life 
is the first and last reality, so subtle, so quiet, yet 
so tenacious, that although I have never expressed 
the truth, and although I have never heard the 
expression of it from any other, I know that the 



272 LECTURE AT AMORY HALL. 

whole truth is here for me. What if I cannot 
answer your questions ? I am not pained that I 
cannot frame a reply to the question, What is the 
operation we call Providence ? There lies the un- 
spoken thing, present, omnipresent. Every time 
we converse, we seek to translate it into speech, 
but whether we hit, or whether we miss, we have 
the fact. Every discourse is an approximate an- 
swer : but it is of small consequence, that we do 
not get it into verbs and nouns, whilst it abides 
for contemplation forever. 

If the auguries of the prophesying heart shall 
make themselves good in time, the man who shall 
be born, whose advent men and events prepare and 
foreshow, is one who shall enjoy his connection 
with a higher life, with the man within man ; shall 
destroy distrust by his trust, shall use his native but 
forgotten methods, shall not take counsel of flesh 
and blood, but shall rely on the Law alive and beau- 
tiful, which works over our heads and under our feet. 
Pitiless, it avails itself of our success, when we 
obey it, and of our ruin, when we contravene it. 
Men are all secret believers in it, else, the word 
justice would have no meaning : they believe that 
the best is the true ; that right is done at last ; or 
chaos would come. It rewards actions after their 
nature, and not after the design of the agent. 
' Work,' it saith to man, ' in every hour, paid or 






NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS. 273 

unpaid, see only that thou work, and thou canst not 
escape the reward : whether thy work be fine or 
coarse, planting corn, or writing epics, so only it be 
honest work, done to thine own approbation, it shall 
earn a reward to the senses as well as to the 
thought : no matter, how often defeated, you are 
born to victory. The reward of a thing well done, 
is to have done it.' 

As soon as a man is wonted to look beyond 
surfaces, and to see how this high will prevails 
without an exception or an interval, he settles him- 
self into serenity. He can already rely on the laws 
of gravity, that every stone will fall where it is due ; 
the good globe is faithful, and carries us securely 
through the celestial spaces, anxious or resigned : 
we need not interfere to help it on, and he will 
learn, one day, the mild lesson they teach, that our 
own orbit is all our task, and we need not assist 
the administration of the universe. Do not be so 
impatient to set the town right concerning the 
unfounded pretensions and the false reputation of 
certain men of standing. They are laboring harder 
to set the town right concerning themselves, and 
will certainly succeed. Suppress for a few days 
your criticism on the insufficiency of this or that 
teacher or experimenter, and he will have demon- 
strated his insufficiency to all men's eyes. In like 
manner, let a man fall into the divine circuits, and 



274 LECTURE AT AM0RY HALL. 

he is enlarged. Obedience to his genius is the only- 
liberating influence. We wish to escape from sub- 
jection, and a sense of inferiority, — and we make 
self-denying ordinances, we drink water, we eat 
grass, we refuse the laws, we go to jail : it is all 
in vain ; only by obedience to his genius ; only by 
the freest activity in the way constitutional to him, 
does an angel seem to arise before a man, and lead 
him by the hand out of all the wards of the prison. 
That which befits us, embosomed in beauty and 
wonder as we are, is cheerfulness and courage, and 
the endeavor to realize our aspirations. The life 
of man is the true romance, which, when it is 
valiantly conducted, will yield the imagination a 
higher joy than any fiction. All around us, what 
powers are wrapped up under the coarse mattings 
of custom, and all wonder prevented. It is so 
wonderful to our neurologists that a man can see 
without his eyes, that it does not occur to them, 
that it is just as wonderful, that he should see with 
them ; and that is ever the difference between the 
wise and the unwise : the latter wonders at what 
is unusual, the wise man wonders at the usual. 
Shall not the heart which has received so much, 
trust the Power by which it lives ? May it not quit 
other leadings, and listen to the Soul that has 
guided it so gently, and taught it so much, secure 
that the future will be worthy of the past ? 









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